CYCLORAMA
Only with such care could history
take form. For years
workers scraped rotted acrylic
from the canvas. Accretions
of bug frass. For years
they in-painted the fields & generals, then,
with surgical instruments, sewed in
a fiberglass corset, hung the thing
like a gown so we
could admire from a platform the order
in Pickett’s death parade. Neat
lines marching in echelon. Perspective
like a minor god’s. We have come
this weekend to believe this. That we,
from a certain angle, made clean
in the workers’ emulsions, are one
in our manicured history. We could be
at the beach. We
could be at the Blue & Gray getting drunk
on three-dollar margaritas, “Tequila Sunrise”
playing on the TouchTunes, the usual
townies beginning to sway. So we are
obedient citizens today. We lean out
above the guns & wagons the workers
have added around the platform, fake
horsepaths winding off
toward the hem of the painting. Impossible,
a Boston newspaper reported
at the unveiling, to say
where the illusion begins. A veteran—
I will show you where I stood.
You see this
was before the internet. No satellite
or drone lowered its camera
yet to the field’s frenzy. When men marched
back to their campsites, they could know,
of battle, barely more
than the curtain of musket smoke
they had moved inside, the smell
of the man beside them. There,
though, around the bonfire
of their grief, they pieced their stories
into narrative. This one,
he swears, saw a pair
of Union lieutenants torn clean
from their horses by grapeshot. Someone
watched the ghost of Stonewall Jackson
weeping near the Peach Orchard. Just so,
the docent tells us, the workers
stitched the painting’s eighteen panels
together to a landscape. Size
of a football field. A flag
they named for a tilt-a-whirl. What more
could we honor ourselves so rightly
with? Like a ride,
we exit through the entrance. To mend it
completely they sewed back the sky.
