When the soldiers came in their dirty blue shirts
I was kneeling in the garden in the rain.
That year only a few ramblers were left
and the trellis had collapsed from the wind.
Still I was glad for the water and darkness that clotted the air;
the days had seemed sour to me in spite of
the glory of the vegetables wandering into fall,
the fat swollen apples and the wild roses
creeping under the lilac. And there, as the men approached,
I stood up near the two willow saplings
sprouted from posts but driven in,
the larger one, by the neighbor boy
when he entered service, the smaller one
when he returned home. I could see
the street from where I stood, as though wrapped
in gauze, heavy with the nests of caterpillars.
(Next week a man with rags tied to sticks
would dip them in kerosene and
burn the worms that would then drop
squirming onto his arms, his hair, the street.)
And then I thought I was lying at the bottom of a pond
edged with grayish leaves and looking up to the surface.
I saw leaves, raindrops shattering the sky
like splinters of glass drifting toward my body;
noises seemed echoes as I continued to distance myself
from what had happened. After that
a disbelief, perhaps I had had a stroke, hit my head,
or fallen asleep and woke to flies banging against my face.
I saw edges of myself being flattened by rain,
could smell the earth too and thought of the years
of rot that made the smell, the rot of my father and his father
and all those who had gone before and how we eat the root
of the earth and then turn into rot ourselves just as
pieces of dirt were grinding away between my teeth and tongue,
my bit of gristle being stirred into earth’s stew.
I began to raise my head and noticed
for the first time the bunting,
red, white, and blue, hung out for the parade.