At the Revolutionary Graveyard
(On Death, and the desecration and desertion
of the once-living by the future-dead)
I am the resurrection and the life; whoever
believes in me, even if he dies, will live
I will open your graves and have you rise
From them, and bring you back to the land.
I
And so those tombstones are as our own shadows, I know,
All growing longer by the moment; though now one might not know
Or own it owing to this one stone sloping, that other slab slanting, another
One stunted, sunken under by no sudden but some slower-than-sun slumping:
But, plot by plot, a lumping together is the common lot, and though here a sodden
Bottom under-sole is mostly mossy rug, elsewhere is more solid soil atop massy rock;
The bottom line is this: amid stones and tombs (Last Day’s wombs) I compose my thanatopsis...
*
All those old soldiers gone cold moldering under soft soil so long ago have only bones
To show for shadowy bodies now, their souls gone, so I hope, to some holier home
(He who, being holy below, hates earth and fears Hades’ shades, may hope to follow,
Though, of course, the source of our Hope is His act of Love done some 2,000 years ago).
So is so much flesh gone in and at a flash, in-and-out and passing fast as any blast
Or bat out of blackness; that is, from where we hope none may come or be cast at last-
And, to say again, a gain of Heaven requires the heart to regard earth forever lost.
*
Each life is blink-like looked back at after its passing, a be we saw was between blankness, blackness,
(Each life as a blind man’s passage) Fate and age bringing sense and being to brink of absence; lad, lass,
Man or maiden, all are made in some same master-image as me (and this is His), are all set at last- alas-
Not to, but to fade, decay, pass and lapse; yet not passing through, perhaps, is some blast – no blank,
That, but a bang and an agony vast as any fact, Life’s end then sudden as thunder, but such hurt struck
Before the thunder’s heard, else- no end to endure- painless, so lightning-quick do the quick stick-stiff
Turn, self’s death as self-observed as self’s birth (more’s the mercy, or else worse the curse for souls
Still burdened with words)… but the ball making no gaping hole, only hail-small, size of a ripe grape
(Say Concord’s) or eyeball, and all-able to send men to a man, so many faces and I’s, safe to a grave.
*
I and my shadow pass slowly over rows, head lowered and sorrowful, though never have my soles
Trod upon any plots (lots of us don’t know not to, for Love of God and brothers, both those above
And below, and it bothers me- such knowing no more than some mole who wouldn’t un-hallow
This holy ground dug-with-shovel with his hole and hovel), and I ponder as I go on God and my Soul,
Not on solving any dissolving of body-from-Form but wonder upon the miracle of one and both.
It’s not now I need a clue for what Faith knew so long ago, and this moment knows as a Truth
Surer than proof itself; one knows, though can show another how he does know just as soon
As he proves the sky is blue to those who, like moles, live and move in darkness all-but-total
(No darkness starker than his who loves to live on in an oblivion of his own foolish choosing).
*
What such suffering must have been none can fathom who hasn’t been there, hasn’t been them,
Men of shots-not-dodged lodged in limbs, a pain worlds-worse than a pin in skin or some needle
Given to you for an inoculation (the worst many feel), such as that but a touch to which we say ‘ouch’
To a true torture as was theirs, since pain as this is akin to a rotten tooth or two needing roots removed
With no novocaine to use; shots of bourbon are drunk- such a drug not as good as laudanum to numb
The wound and saw to come- and a bullet given to gnaw on, then limbs (awful thought!) are lopped off,
Body and bone sawed on like a log, dropped raw, thrown off as of no worth (God help the poor dog,
Hopefully knocked-out, unconscious as a rock, as doctors, clotting and patching, watch for shock,
Soon moving on in search of the next victim in need of the surgeons’ knowledge and instruments;
May God and His Son comfort them for so much suffering, for such crosses all but beyond shouldering).
Long after the slaughter’s over some old soldier, of sound mind, common sense and little laughter,
Will have told wife or son or daughter (or not a soul) all about his missing limb still existing as whole
As before it was lost in war; a bit limp or rigid, sure, cut not to nub, stub or stump, but just a touch short,
And when the wind is up, whether the weather’s warm or frigid, the air skims his skin and there-
To a hair- is leg or arm that was missing; all this, he insists, is witness for his Soul otherwise hidden
(So soldiers, sailors, physicians, victims, have whispered of such phantoms as those that visit him).
II
Man goes about as a mere phantom, he hurries about,
although in vain; he heaps up stores without knowing for whom
Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same
Wave with the meadow, forget that there must
The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come
I’ve not come with flags or flowers now, nor with sighs for these sights, but with only my silence
As seems right among these rows of stones, and with those thoughts best thought in moments
When one is all alone; that notion Memento mori is most potent then, when men are solemn
Either from custom or emotion, sometimes both, and if not numb from knowing how under
This same sun numberless have passed- I never thought death had undone so many as that-
As, at last, oneself shall pass as the grass (no denying dying), the beautiful uncut hair of graves…
But not now all alone, neither in my dying nor in my being here beside those men who died
And are buried six feet-by-two centuries-plus deep (so I contemplate in my paces space-amid-time):
By my not-alone I mean I’m mocked, not by Death- so thou, O hated Death, be not proud-
Nor mockingbirds, but crows, for over these rows not one lone but a whole flock is in an oak
That, it being winter now, lost its cloak months ago and looks less like Life than like, well, bones.
I don’t name a naked, limb-missing oak for Death, or mean the crowsNature set above (Fate set me
Below?) to be Death’s pet symbol, for I’d then have them ravens upon graves, parroting raving Poe,
Or vultures perched on sculptures, scavengers or avengers, pickers of ours like poor Yorick’s skull
(Cosmic comics, we half-laugh and jest at Death’s shallowness just to keep off weeping its depths).
Feel free to mock- go join in with those cawing crows- calling it all oh-so-romantic and poetic,
But their mocking was in blocking silence and its offspring: my focus, notice, not less than the noetic…
*
I notice how a Roman-numeral-clock atop some denominational, non-Roman church just across
The way on the paved and dead-end block also mocks me about my fate and grave… I fathom-
Mind you, I’m not mad as Poe, Ahab, a March Hare or 3rd George, not dreading a dead man’s
Beating heart under a floor, or whales or whatever else- I fathom each second that elapses,
Each tick-tock (tick-tick, in fact, but Mind or brain must fashion a more satisfying pattern)
Is some summons to remember my December amid my days of May (or, as a poet says,
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old time is still a-flying) and so dread my being dead.
The sun is getting much nearer his setting so I must be just so much nearer to fretting
Over the dreadful end; but now life’s twice its span and maybe I can relax with naps
As another Rip Van Winkle and simply rest in peace of sleep, sheep and endless Zs.
Still, bells knell to tell me with ding-dong (Mind or brain, again, fashions patterns)
Time (mine is an it that’s in me, is me?) is not long and to live while I’ve still time-
But I know it will not still, stop or knot (contra Einstein), as Augustine reminds.
Well… we are all mostly too self-conscious now (having hardly half the selves
We once did it’s hard to think of how), yet would all-but-die to forget Death,
For we regret we, the living, shall be dead far longer than we get to be alive-
A truth to you, me, a babe whose first breath is Death or else a Methuselah,
And no being, even given 9 lives or 969 years to thrive, will leave Life alive.
My mocking clock is stopped as if someone forgot to wind it up, but not
Stopped is that tick-tock of Time as it is in itself… or as it is in my Mind
(That is, no Mad Hatter lives in my head or Mind to murder the time).
And now, looking up, I find no noon sun just one that must too soon
Be sunken under-horizon and know no new one (or moon) is rising.
(Each church bell’s tolling is as an orison to The Son who is risen,
And all praise and prayers we raise in air are our song in unison-
So no bell will I fear I hear with a heart dear as well as with ear).
*
They’re tearing down some long-unused white wood church (where some white-as-wool flock
Once gathered under a shepherd’s look and crook) while I write this now (not that older one
Of my mocking clock, but its time too must come, and soon- but another one just beyond),
Making room, it’s safe to assume, for a boom of one- or two-bedroom homes (but in a bubble),
And there’s so much rubble, with not one but many tons more to come, and a pair of Caterpillars
(No black cats just yellow CATs here) picking over what must get trucked to the dump.
They‘ve taken down the bell whose tongue for so long swung and sung out ding-dong
Among both the dead and living, bringing it from its tower- it’s anyone’s guess to where
(Who knows but it was stolen to be melted down and sold, as the price per-ounce just now,
Of all from bronze to gold- that at two thousand– is growing… profit the only motive to move it,
For far better to earn by it than reuse it or turn it to an urn or vase or save it as a tub for Diogenes).
*
A bell swelling Sunday’s air with songs solemn or melodies fair is one noise and two (is a noise
That annoys no true lovers of song and Son, for sound that‘s as a siren yelling out ‘Time is passing’
To some is telling another ‘Christ is risen’), whose knelling urges us on to kneeling, its tolling
Causing such surging in our hearts tears will be welling up from realms only God can search.
Some among us find this ringing brings violence to silence, is less the mellifluous, celestial music
Of nine blessed choirs than violins untuned allied with alley felines screeching-while-dying
All nine lives simultaneously (perish any thought of swans going off in song), not to mention
(Still I will) a trio of horns, cymbals, gongs- think Stravinsky’s riotous Rite of Spring in its first run
(These lines I write on the first day of spring regarding a cemetery in the town of Springfield,
A thing and a name I think, both as to time and place, quite striking- symbol-rich I mean)
And we name the selfsame Death that comes in sleep that goes on drum and bugles its fame.
*
Some prefer other noise, as crash-clash of pot-and-pan, rock bands and any sirens to silence…
Or can confuse the two, for some can’t tell any difference (as in Japan), even as some can’t
Their left from right hand- and Einstein of nearby Princeton (a battle more famous to history
Than this all-but-forgotten victory) wore his watch on a band, not tucked in his pocket,
To tell side from side, not time from Time- it being relative- and some, also being that,
Can’t tell right from wrong, brightness from blackness or sight from blind-as-batness)…
These, conscience-burdened, prefer to die in the din of Iniquity’s den (an Eden to them)
Amid a blend of strains as, say, stray cats catching rats- racket that, to consciences singed by sin,
Sounds as sweet as nine Sirens singing, and will die to silence, if only they can, all talk of silence:
Here- contra Dr. Johnson- I think word and thing must be one thing, for if I speak it I break it.
But I best leave off this rambling lest some think me whistling past the cemetery on the theme-
Equally, I think, a thing and a nothing, maybe just some projection of what will and still won’t be-
And I seem to be another Johnson, deepest of human beings except in dreading being nothing;
Nor, for the record, am I Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be- still the theme I keep before me…
*
It required no Einstein to state a rose is a rose is a rose 1,001 times over, and there’s no there there;
One might’ve said so of Death, a thing mainly to the living who we comfort with, ‘there, there, my dear’,
A strange kind of state (they’re lying who say only the dead or dying can taste it, for the living do too,
Perhaps as an aftertaste), one that may both apply and not to Frankenstein, say, yet never, in that way,
To a Saint, for what might be just unjust death to Edith was Life to Theresa, Love conquering everything
And nothing Love, as Saul-turned-Paul taught; all the deepest we say may be mere tautology, as A is A,
Or a mirror reflecting a mirror, and we’re fooled by words and what seems as reason is treasonous to us,
But after Wittgenstein (beware philosophers without laughter) we know better, they say, what we say…
This is as plain as it may be made: nothing is nothing, an equation equally, seemingly, false and true,
As in no thing (that nothing that’s something) is not something, and nothing (Nothing itself,
Which is just not anything) is simply not; a knot indeed (but only in words, so to speak),
But if speaking of Death and Evil as nothings I mean as privations of to Live and be Good
(And since even sins of omission are committed let’s make sincere confession), and these we fear
As we fear shadows or the dark (present to us as an absence of glow), and I’ve even heard that zero,
Oddly enough, was a tough thing to think… witness, too, the positively frightful whiteness of Death,
Of The Whale or shark or bear, or the madness of Ahab or Lear- what was it if not absence of sense?).
Well, some suppose holes are also as nothing, just not a nothing you’d long to fall into, like Death,
These Sheol-deep holes causing the absence of soil to appear as the absence of soul- except holes,
In earth, or ones black, are lack of what was full, not, as the fool’s heart says of God, was never at all…
But Truth, which some suppose dwells at the bottom of a well, says hold, for Death also is the hole
Without which there’s no halo, is self dying wholly to self (what’s left?), and then- less- of flesh,
Necessary for all holier Life: and all my insights are right or wrong- and nothing, but nothing, is left,
Else this to say: the opposite of Death is not quite Life, is not yet not-Death, is not its denial- is nothing?
III
Hail Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners,
Now and at the hour of our death. Amen
Before the pitcher is shattered at the spring
and the wheel is broken at the well,
Before the dust returns to the ground from which it came
and the spirit to God who gave it
Who can dare care for this sacred acre anymore, or for those who ached, bled and are buried here?
I dare say if any did they’d have let monarch Progress mock their rest over their dead bodies, not theirs…
Nary two feet from the cemetery-edge (yet not exactly the edge, as edge would suggest a boundary,
But some buffer, say, of a hundred feet- not two feet from where a stone crookedly grows from a stump
Under which one of these Revolutionary dead was laid to rest above two centuries ago, with love…)
You’ll see, not a wrought-iron fence or evergreen hedge, and hardly some monument to the dead- no-
And don’t expect it’s anything lush, delicately cut shrubs or the brush where thrushes utter their song,
But (who could invent it?) a giant vent that exhales exhaust from some luxury property’s parking garage!
(Feet from there I read: Exit/Enter 8’ 8’’, ironic sign to remind all passing through of Eternity & Infinity).
As if adding insult to indignity, the gas company has set its meter less than that from one eroding stone,
And Ben Franklin might, quite frankly, be shocked again to see how the electric utility did a similar thing;
A bit above all this are windows one could throw a stone from- or spit- and still hit the remotest stone,
Views for lovers, husbands, wives, some .5 child to look back at to see by the past- or past- what comes.
*
Among the many amenities in a million-dollar-building like this one must be the luxury of remembering
You’re blessed not to be numbered among the dead, or among them as neighbors who are strangers;
Bet a million on it someone will address those in the lowest places, saying, ‘All ye dead, come hither,
Rise higher, reside at an address where the living is lovelier’, if only they’d make another almighty dollar.
Yes, Progress will tell me people must live and so need somewhere to live in, yet I reply people must
(I trust) die and so need somewhere to be dead in, and burying cemeteries with their departed is nuts,
But I’ll let such as these I speak of, who are nuts, be laid to rest not by monks but- I guess- chipmunks.
(Pray help us men to remember Death, O St. Benedict, you whose Transitus we remember this month!).
*
Whatever the maintenance fee here may be not a quarter of it (25 cents I mean) seems for maintaining
Any of these (the cost of death here is high and I, while not prophet-wise, foresee paupers’ reburials),
And whether the stone’s granite, soap, sand, lime, the weather ever does its work unpaid and on time,
And though none hires it it’s far more faithful than we, their heirs, not were (for we were) but now are.
They all flake and fade, crack and break, most with names, dates, tracings and lines effaced with time,
And some are toppled as if they’ve dropped dead from age and some struggle against trunk and stump;
Most are covered in lichens, mold, mildew and mosses Moses-old (or Noahs or Jonahs, also buried here)
And, rather than be raised up to await The Last Day, may be placed with that rubble there over the way.
I’m not sure if the drowsy church across the way or a lazy state agency owns the grounds, but just today
It’s I who’ve taken away the blown-in and never-passing-away Styrofoam, plastic wrappers and bags,
And I almost wish these handkerchiefs of today, undesignedly dropped, bore on their own corners
Their owner’s names- I’d return them, saying, ‘Someday your names may be on coroners’ toe-tags’,
And, ‘We’re not anonymous to God in our graves, even if someday the moss covers up our names’…
Some are frozen and so don’t even care, or are such clods as not to know, that here are not mere clods
(Say ‘You’ll be buried here’ and, seeing through a lens of You, they’d value the ground above the clouds),
But to any who cared for the sacred red shed here the greater love of green would seem naked greed;
But Progress sees with go-colored glasses and won’t stop… no, not for blood, for that’s colored red.
IV
We die with the dying; see, they depart and we go with them…
Where, O Death, where is your sting?
None could bear to hear the groans of those whose organs or limbs were ripped, riddled, riven,
(Or if one could then only barely, and that one is less some fit specimen of men than a demon,
And yet many a woman, nurse and nun do touch such suffering and woe better than do men…),
Moans of men whose blood, in opposing the Monarch-march on Washington, the British onrush
And Hessian progress, gushed (but not to a Noah’s flood, for their numbers decreased but minimally),
Still in this, as in every war, far too many are the deceased and diseased, and the suffering seizes all…
(These lifers and volunteers used Watts’s wads to wad shots and rifles, but who knows- God alone will-
If all is fair in war, and if so using those sacred Psalms that raise up saints stains one’s palms in blood…
Such can’t be removed by a man rubbing his hands ‘til raw, but can by washing in Blood of the Lamb).
One might, amid a bit of quiet, almost hear two hundred years later discord of war like roar of water-
Yet can’t hear, just to be clear, since nearby an interstate interferes with any chance at silent listening…
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, and I believe I’ve found out that what it is is sound,
For the roar of rubber-on-road rolls over the sound-wall like roll of drums and guns over a battlefield
And- marvel of engineering- the wall holds all sound back that would otherwise pass on to new ground,
Is a sort of sieve that sifts out silence and lets in the sound of a thousand engines loud as Injuns’ shouts
(As they said in those colonial days- but yes, the land was theirs before our war to prove whose it was).
Add to this, somewhere someone’s mowing the grass that can scarcely have grown the year is so young,
Either that or it’s the blowing of last year’s leaves I hear, but it’s more far-off than near so I can’t be sure
(Shoveling snow not mowing more usual here this time of year) and, lately, the piling up of much rubble
And a double Caterpillar-shoveling not for catacombs, but rather, I suppose, luxury tombs for the living
(While I’m at it I have to ask it- can’t walls act as a casket for the living, as was the case in Poe’s Cask?)
And one can hardly, unless trying hard indeed, remember the motto Memento mori in this cemetery…
*
I hope not to lose hope (Apostle Paul in his epistle tells all who love the Son never to lose Hope,
Not to be as ones who have none when Death calls someone home), and it’s still only March,
After all, so maybe when the cold that often shrouds my soul these three or four months long
Starts to shred and shed under the coming sun (this one has shone only to show shadows growing),
I’ll begin, the cloud, cold and corpse-color cloak lifting, to look on the bright side and for silver linings,
Dropping this as-Ecclesiastes and Lamentations-mentality of moping- and, well, here’s to hoping…
I’ll suppose my own constitution needs amending and I should focus on how all this growth is roses.
But what charm, chant, cant or man can halt, alter or slow the sooner-or-later march of holy Progress?
Go stop Death’s march, when to exist is to pass through an arch which one, once entering, never exits
(Yet Death, if it exists, exists as a name in a phrase, or as a phase to face, but has no shape, is no place).
Abandon hope I won’t (hope dies not last but not), and I’ll be damned if I stop and greet all Man’s Plots
And Plans as plants in Eden needing all Creation- Heaven even- to green and seed past their plastic pots.
*
It needs no prophet to tell that the hope of profit will cause men to sell their souls- but what a cost,
Our Lord warns us, to gain just a bit of dirt and dust too soon lost- and for a nickel or quarter, no more,
(Comparatively speaking, for a cold million is no more than a cent if weighed against what is decent)
This century they’ll bury by pouring cement or paving over this cemetery, and so grant each grave
Its own sort of interment; but, not to worry or be sorry, one will still get to visit it on the Internet;
I wonder if it’s too ruthless to say a truth: they’ll exhume who remains to make room for who can pay.
Areas- as are these- where we bury our dead, and such dead as are here, are as hallowed, I’d wager,
As any are allowed to be (the corporal works of mercy really are mercy, and mercy a form of Charity,
And nothing is greater, for Charity is Love- go look in the Good Book that’s better than any dictionary-
And Love does no harm to another, not for love or money, and never will barter a brother for a dollar;
How could it when Love dies for another and ends all its deadliest enemies by counting them friends).
I fear the danger of my worse angel of anger-at hovering near, or- heaven forbid- even over, or in me,
But I hope it’s the better one of Love that makes me hate what I relate of this bad-as-Arnold betrayal;
Not more than mortal, and immoral enough to show how Man- in soul so noble- in his acts he’s as ashes.
*
This to end: this land was deeded to these dead for their deeds at history’s Forgotten Victory of 1780,
(The land was theirs and they are the land’s… the deed of gift was many deeds of war, our poet reminds)
Is not now and forever The Developer’s or- bitter notion this- simply written over to Mr. Highest-Bidder;
Is land forever for them, and for those who loved and lived among them when we were not yet a nation;
Theirs forever for sake of forsaking their lives, and for a larger-by-far land they made us heir to besides;
May we not be bone-hollow in a promise to honor those soldier-souls who have fought and have fallen
But recall all we’ve forgotten and the hallowed ground they rest in now, the same being ours tomorrow.
Epitaph
(as read on the plaque dedicated to these dead)
Their deeds enriched and glorified our nation.
In commemoration the heroic service performed at
The Battle of Springfield
during the war for
American Independence
by the soldiers who remains are
resting within this sacred tract.
Sons of The America Revolution
(150th anniversary of the engagement, June 21, 1930)
~ March 2023
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