The field lay all before us. That first
evening we could almost see
the South’s skirmish lines furling out
like a ribbon. Pickett
whirling on his stallion.
On Cemetery Ridge
Union monuments threw their shadows
across the breastworks.
That first evening
the light lured itself
west down the faces of Pennsylvania’s
low bluffs, beyond which
California, so late
our home, turned to gold
without us—its nothing
history, groves
of concrete & sex.
Our Penske truck
idled near the Angle. The engine
ticked til it cooled.
*
“This area is the most thoroughly improved I ever
saw. Apples, quinces, &c. in utmost profusion, and
bee hives ad infinitum. Wheat, corn, half a dozen
varieties of grass met the eye at every turn, all in rock
or strong and closely built wooden fences.”
-Pvt. John C. West, 4th Texas, June, 1863
*
At which, the fence-rows,
the rebel army, advancing
here on its copse of trees, stopped
to open its passage.
Anatomy
of single-family livestock farming.
Our free state’s
mute resistance, therefore, to the sweep
& pomp of plantation slavery. To acre
cotton, swamp Louisiana’s
rice paddies. To Master
gazing from his window. Amen,
the very stones would cry out.
*
In Gettysburg
it was summertime.
We tilled the side yard—year
of our engagement—
for sweet corn. We sat out
all season in our swimsuits, in
love, in lawn
chairs with fruit & cocktails. Corey
read Whitman. We knew,
I suppose, that soldiers—
day one—had fallen gut-shot
in our driveway, though we
forgot this almost always. In so
charming a place forgot—Whitman,
1863—the heap
of feet & arms, et cetera. Men
sawed into stumps. Men cut
away from themselves—it was
not lost, the simile—like
the nation they had risen for.
Our fruit
shone in its dishes. In swim masks
neighbor kids filled their guns
at our garage’s spigot.
*
What, though,
would be a just form
of remembrance? It was a year
of champagne & police shootings. Statues
toppled. Schoolkids
tracked Pokémon across the hill—the high-
water mark, men named it—
where Armistead, saber flickering
above him like lens-flare, fell
from his horse
into eternity. Where, wavering
momentarily—the music
swelling, slow pan
across the ridgeline—the South lapped back
on itself like a flood. For months
I dreamed of storm surge.
In the morning
Segway tours moved
in silhouette against the statues. In slash
marks. Imagine—
everywhere
the line breaking.
*
WHO GAVE UP THEIR LIVES IN DEFENSE OF
A PERPETUAL UNION WHO FELL UPON
THIS FIELD WHO ELSEWHERE DIED UNDER
THE FLAG THIS MONUMENT IS DEDICATED
*
As for us,
we strutted like models. Bronze
in our suntans, young
still, we arranged ourselves
in the season’s poses. The Peach
Orchard, day two—we kissy-
faced for the camera above us.
Beyond the lens
the sky of Pennsylvania laid out
as it had, once, for soldiers
as they dozed in the bluestem. Shellfire
sailed above them in parabolas.
Who lacked the words
flight path. Who lacked
vector & arc. “I watched a dark
line flit overhead,” one said. One said,
“lines toward every angle
of the compass.” So some kind
of marvelous poetry pulled its contrail
across the firmament.
The photographs
one is likely familiar with—one
of these men face up
in a tangle of rocks, a rifle
propped beside him—were staged,
we know, for ideal effect.
My favorite—
we are romping together toward sunset.
Reckless.
We understand
nothing, yet, of the endless ways
we will hurt each other, in awe
still of our own
dumb beauty. Nobody
is saying we have not suffered. They are just
such civilized photos.
*
From Round Top,
the guidebooks note, the fields fall off
in terraces. There
is goldenrod & ginger.
Beebalm. Dicentra
eximia—bleeding heart. There are
cooper’s hawks & wood thrushes. One
could have a picnic
really, though we
savored, in our car, our McDonald’s
fries & milkshakes. A Coke. So,
we said, American.
All war,
gapers came with their finery.
Field glasses. Baskets
of port & fougasse. Congressmen
hired carriages afterward
& rode out—oak
coolers filled with champagne, the prostitutes
dazzling in their hoop skirts—to see
for themselves the rumored field.
They found
their country. Love,
I will watch with you
til we are broomsedge. The asters
opening their mouths
in the Slaughter Pen. We fed
each other fats in manifold forms.
Starlings lifted. This place,
we said, for the life of us—
*
ON THIS GROUND FOR THEIR RIGHTEOUS CAUSE IN GLORY
THEY SLEEP WHO GAVE TO IT THEIR LIVES TO VALOR
*
But first
they buried the corpses. Before
the monuments’ bronze rhetoric, black troops
paced the field with their shovels.
They sang
folk hymns. They hung garlic
around their necks, so wretched
& swollen were the bodies. Blowflies
laid eggs in the corpses’ nostrils.
John Moffett,
alive still, his skull shot away
above the temple, touched his brain
as it flaked into coral petals.
Remember, rarely
were there coffins. They covered them
in knapsacks, the shirts,
sometimes, off their backs. That gently
they kept them from the dirt.
It was the work
of one man to make them
gravestones. They christened him Letterer.
*
“Deep, boys, deep—so the beasts won’t get me.”
-Pvt. Jeremiah Gage, 11th Mississippi, July, 1863
*
The past, that year, kept coming back
like a fever. In College Park
at a bus-stop, a supremacist—
In Stamford, on a garage door—
Everywhere
white men carried torches.
Mornings were hammered pewter.
Starless.
I ran repeat
miles down West Confederate, fell,
I admit, in love
a little with the statues’ nostalgia. Their syntax
like a burning cross.
Would we not,
though—living then, as they
did, in Vicksburg,
say, in brocaded
evening skirts, a suit
merely for fox hunting—have made Mississippi
our god?
Election night,
I heard howling
& whooping from the Mine Saloon.
“You understand,”
David said—a student, a
black man—“most days
we want to kill all of you.”
*
& one morning, dawn—a Silverado
on Cemetery Ridge. In its bed, erect
on a home-built dais, a Confederate flag.
For an hour
he cruised the breastworks, as if,
we thought, to embody
there some last-ditch ghost dance. Dead
South. New life. Tourist,
we called him,
& ran.
*
WE SLEEP HERE IN OBEDIENCE TO LAW WHEN DUTY
CALLED WE CAME WHEN COUNTRY CALLED WE DIED
*
The Fourth, though, we floated
gauzily among rattan tables.
Cicadas buzzed.
Some country
ballad drifted from an iPhone, above
all of which Douglass—what
to the slave
is the Fourth of July—listened,
once, to a people’s plainsong
rising like bier-smoke. We saw
from our lawnchairs only
the fireworks wilting in their spheres, a show
of light & color which was
for us the echo
always of some prior artillery.
Consider
Pickett waiting in the treeline. The two-
shot signal. The skirt of lead
his army lowered before him, single
loudest sound yet heard
on the continent. Consider
Douglass, 1852—what,
to the slave,
is your Preamble? Your paper
lanterns dangling in their trees—
*
“An eagle in the very midst of the thunderstorm
might have experienced such confusion. Milton’s
account of the great battle between the forces of
good and evil, which originated in this same
question of secession, gives some faint idea of
this artillery duel.”
-Pvt. John C. West, 4th Texas, July 27, 1863
*
So it was, for them,
a question—secession. So that
when Davis rose in the Senate, when spy balloons
lifted from the Rappahannock, the hard
scholars in Cambridge
debated synecdoche. Gk.—
the understanding one
with the other. Just what,
they asked, is a country.
The conscripted,
that night, fitted their exploits into History—part
for the whole. Most
owned no slaves. Most surgeons
cut quickly.
*
Why not, then, ten flavors
of cupcake? Guests
from California. Torches. Why not
the pinwheel centerpieces? My
war-bride. My white-
organza’d. Who,
long runs—the sunlight
a kind of breathing
in the mist, the low hills
shrouded—would stop
near Culp’s field to pet the calves,
just risen. For that
men shouldered to the wall. Who called it
love, then. One
& one. Brother,
we are told, against brother. Thus
civil. Syn.—
gracious, complaisant. Sweet,
like a country
we wed.
*
“The men are in splendid spirits. The smell of the
dead is awful. We have all got sixty-five crackers
to celebrate the day with.”
-Samuel Russel, 96th Pennsylvania, July 12, 1863
*
& when the day came, the rain
came with it. We swept
our clutch of well-wishers—fetched,
that is, our mothers, some
champagne flutes—to a room
where men, we knew, let part of their bodies go
to preserve their bodies. Not
whole, precisely. Her white was
eggshell. Antique.
Bone. There would be
a fact here. That surgeons,
called “operators,” knotted the veins
& arteries of their patients
with horsehair. That here,
on the Fourth of July, Lee’s army
reeled south in just such
a Pennsylvania rainstorm. In lace
finery, in archival
ink we authored our names. I take you
Corey, I said, til death do
us part.
*
PERFORMING THEIR SACRED DUTY AS THEY UNDERSTOOD IT
THEIR NAMES ARE INSCRIBED ON FAMES IMMORTAL SCROLL
*
& so we drove south. In summer fever,
at sunrise. A rented Mustang. Just
Married on the rear windshield.
We understood this
as pilgrimage, part
of our people’s dear ritual. In the distance,
the steeples of Charleston
threaded the fog. Sumter
lay flat & irredeemable in the harbor.
How pleasing
we found it to wander—whole
South like a bathhouse—from heat
to air-conditioning. Oysters
terraced on ice. I took this
from Charleston—when Sumter fell,
Confederate gunners removed their hats. History
is like that,
there.
*
It was, we admitted though,
the South’s statuary—West
Confederate, Pennsylvania,
the 21st century—
that most enthralled us. Art
as compensation, grace, spring rainstorms
sweeping the delta.
In De Lue’s
Louisiana monument, Saint Barbara—of
armorers & firemen,
artillery—lifts
a flaming mortar shell in her upturned palm. Plays
in the other the trumpet—
fluted, gold—
of resurrection, the dead man
at her feet a gunner
in New Orleans’ artillery.
Shoelaces ragged. Imagine
how desperately they believed. Before
we raze the thing, place
your hand in the gunner’s palm.
It is open, oversized
like his feet, the sculptor’s
trademark.
You can feel its heat.
*
But mainly, I miss the cows.
On Culp’s Hill,
evenings, you can see them
feeding in their pasture. The shadows
will lengthen, some last
pressed thinness of light laying itself
on the switchgrass. The calves,
just born,
will wobble behind you. For them,
the grass—the golden
wave rising in its distances, Whitman’s
hair of graves—that grass
is only the grass. Good
cows—I could love us
that faithfully. They are,
sometimes, so close
you can hear them breathing
*
“The time may vary a few months, or even a few
decades, but the job will be settled and that all
right too. I am, in this matter, like St. Paul’s
Charity, ready to bear, believe, hope, and endure
all things for the cause, knowing if we do, we also,
like Charity, shall never fail. This has been a
most egotistical letter.”
-William Wheeler, 13th New York, July 26, 1863
Christopher Kempf is the author, most recently, of What Though the Field Be Lost, forthcoming in spring 2021 from LSU Press. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.
