. 7. From the Spoon to the Marne: poems of my grandfather’s war

Of the thirty-odd poems located along the Spoon River, perhaps a third center around the figure of my German grandfather, and of those a good many concern his experience in the First World War and the lingering effects of that experience once he had returned. The following poem, a narrative in blank verse, portrays my grandfather and grandmother just as she is sending him off to war.

NIGHTS BY A WINDOW, LISTENING FOR A TRAIN

After a year, the pain of his leaving
had settled within her as though a small
insidious seed had taken root
and folded her heart in filament.
As the morning of his departure passed
to the never-ending night of his absence,
the stark, untenanted rooms around her,
rooms of inveterate shadow her lamp
was powerless to dispel, and of cold,
indifferent walls that had never warmed,
in spite of the usual fire she kept–
each of the rooms closed in like a prison
whose windows could only return a pale
reflected face, a face she could scarcely
mark as her own, so hollow and white
and strange it had grown. In those unrelieved,
unrestful hours that made up her nights,
she could feel a filament of the seed
insinuating itself in her soul,
a seed of forboding that lay in wait
for the single thing that would draw it forth
to flower into a terrible grief:
a knock at the door and a telegram.

A night together as husband and wife
was all that circumstance had allowed,
a night which, lest he leave her widowed
with child, they spent in separate rooms,
joined by the distance that lay between them.
The following morning she rode with him
to the depot where, with orders to join
a battalion forming for duty in France,
he would board a train for camp in Virginia.

Parted by only the width of a hand
as they sat on the wagon’s wooden seat,
they composed but a single silhouette,
belying the sense of isolation
that each began to feel in the other.
He urged the mare to a trot, but offered
little in the way of conversation
while she, in the grip of apprehensions
so strange and particular to herself
she could find no way to permit them voice,
sat wrapped in a silence deep as his own.

When they reached the station, she held him close
for a fiery instant, then rushed away
without looking back and hurried ahead
till she found herself on the outskirts of town
by the edge of a field, and there she stopped.
Somewhere off to the east she could faintly
distinguish the clack of wheel upon rail
suspended upon the late morning air…
and then it was lost completely, as though
she had only dreamed it, or only heard
the murmurous rasp of wind sweeping in
over acres of bleached and drying corn.

A lifetime of waiting had passed since then,
and letters received in the interval,
letters in envelopes mottled by rain
and mud from places unknown, each bearing
a censor’s stamp and, for postage, a phrase–
each letter held something less of the one
she remembered, as though what kept them apart
had turned to a distance more than miles,
more than the lapse of time. She was helpless
to stay the gradual drifting apart
of something unnameable they had shared,
of a feeling altogether too frail
to survive the prolonged monotonies
and sporadic storms of a soldier’s life,
or even the simple, merciless fact
that many letters took months to arrive
while many others were lost. She as well
might have sought to hold the peculiar, soft
and lyrical presence of light that filled
her room for an hour on certain days
in the aftermath of autumn. She felt
the close of a promise that once had lain
open between them– she felt it now
like the close of evening beyond her door,
dimming the distant fields.

                                                 In the months
that followed, the dread she had always known,
the dread that he might be killed, was replaced
by something less understood, by a fear
whose origen she was uncertain of,
unless it began with an unexpected
darkness of phrase in one of his letters
or else with the premonitions that rose
unbidden as birds from out of a field–
a fear that he, in a part of his soul,
had suffered death of a different order,
a death to be nursed in his heart, to be borne
back into life, to the woman he loved,
like a plague-carrying ship into harbor.
And she felt, without the strength to admit
so much as a breath of it to herself,
that the leave her husband had taken of her
the morning after their wedding, had proven
final at last. He would not return.
The soldier who would survive to step down
from the somber train as it hissed to a stop,
who would search the crowd for her face until
he feels the touch of her hand on his arm
and hears his name spoken– this same soldier
would turn to her with the eyes of a stranger.

In the next poem, based on an actual incident several years after the war, my grandparents are disturbed late at night by a group of neighbor who have just discovered two murdered bodies in a nearby farmhouse and have come to my grandfather for help, as he is the only one among them who has had experience with violent death. I presume word was also sent to the sheriff, but whether he was further away or unavailable, it seems the neighbors’ initial reaction was to come to seek out my grandfather. Finding herself unexpectedly alone, with her husband once more gone off into the darkness of death and the unknown, released a host of buried fears in my grandmother.

 

THE DARK FIELDS

A rap at the door. She dropped her sewing,
disconcerted, and rose to her feet,
but already her husband had crossed the room
and stood at the window, peering through blinds.
“It’s all right,” he assured her, “they’re neighbors.”
He stepped to the door and opened it wide.
Four haggard faces stared back at him.
“You’d better come with us,” one of them said,
“there’s been a murder.” The woman’s hand
rose to her open mouth. She pleaded
“Al?” but her husband had put on his coat.
The men looked uneasy. “Give us a moment,”
he said to them. They returned to the dark.
“This isn’t something they’ve seen before,”
he told her softly. He saw her shudder
and turn away. “Go on,” she whispered,
“you’d better hurry.”

                                       How long after that,
how long after hearing the clatter of hooves
recede into silence, she sat alone
in the soft wavering light of a lamp
and stared at her hands, she could never say.
That which awaited her husband disturbed
a deeper part of herself than she knew
and, unaware that what he would find
at an isolated farm up the road
was a woman shot and a man hanged,
she imagined the killer loose in the night
and herself alone in the empty house.
Dimming the lamp, she moved to the window
and stared down the vacant road, unable
to fathom a thing in the heavy dusk,
unable to see where her husband stood
in a ring of silent men in a barn,
cutting a dead man down from a rafter.

Too many winter nights she had watched
at this same window, delving the darkness
beyond the reflected face in the glass,
beyond the porch and the yard, throughout
the months that her husband was overseas.
For weeks she had watched an old disfigured
oak on the hilltop, silhouetted
like a shape of anguish against the stars,
a shape nearly human, twisted in pain.
A voice from the Revelation of John
grew audible in those nights, a voice heard
as a child, hectored in ominous tones
from the depths of some evangelist’s tent,
a voice that conjured apocalyptic
shapes from her own interior night,
shapes in a vapor that never resolved–
and now, as she stood alone in the house,
alone but for all the spectral fears
that closed upon her, she grew aware
of something with neither face nor form
against the sky on the hill, something stark.
Abruptly she ran to the kitchen door
and fled out across the yard to the gate,
tripping and stumbling but still running on,
away from the house, the hill, the road,
running until the remotest light
had vanished and there was nothing at all
but a black and indeterminate void
of field and starless sky and the sudden
unendurable pounding of her heart.

 

The next poem portrays my grandfather’s war experience through the eyes of his daughter. (This poem was first published in the Sewanee Review, and later reprinted in Sparrow: A Yearbook of the Sonnet).

 

 

HER FATHER’S WAR

On the very morning that she was born,
he collected and packed them up for good;
a few he consigned to the bottom drawer
of an old bureau– the rest he stowed
in an iron-bolstered trunk in the barn:
the moth-balled remains of a buried war.
For a dozen years they were sealed away,
interred like a memory long-suppressed,
till she asked him once, on a winter day,
if he’d been in the war. He looked surprised.
“Come to the barn,” he said. When he lifted
the lid of the trunk, she saw a folded
winterfield jacket, an overseas cap,
a compass, canteen, and a battered cup.

When later she asked again of the war,
such innocent things were all he revealed.
If it hadn’t been for a door left ajar
one night, as her father sat up alone
by the open trunk, she’d never have known
of the other objects he kept concealed:
a holstered pistol, cartridges, medals,
foreign citations unrolled from a tube,
and darker relics retrieved in battle
from the rocks and ravines of Belleau Wood:
iron crosses and buckles, a bayonet
with its hilt the form of an eagle’s head,
all torn from bloody tunics of the dead
and then smuggled home in a service kit.

Later that spring, on Memorial Day,
her father and other veterans marched
the length of a cedar-lined path to pay
respects to the local fallen. She thrilled
at how stern he appeared among the men,
at how smartly he bore himself, unmatched
in the curt retort and snap of his drill.
She shuddered to hear the synchronized crack
of volleys fired again and again
from a line of rifles slanted above
the white wooden cross of a soldier’s grave.
Observing the set of her father’s face,
like statuary, she pondered the lack
of expression, the marble stare into space.

That night, as she huddled asleep in bed,
a spasm of coughing rose from below
to disorient her dream, coughing so
consumptive she woke with a nauseous dread.
She tried to ignore it, turning her head
to stare at the silhouette of a silo
beyond the window, surrounded by stars.
But it was impossible not to think
of the deathly noise. Stealing downstairs,
she followed light to the kitchen where, as
her father had never spoken of gas,
she was startled and scarcely understood
when he buckled abruptly at the sink
and brightened all its enamel with blood.

 

Next is a portrayal of my grandfather re-visiting the war at the end of his life. (This poem was first published in the Sewanee Review, and later reprinted in Sparrow: A Yearbook of the Sonnet).

 

 

  

LAST STAND

When he woke in a cloud of pain to find
that he’d been installed in a narrow bed
in a strange room, a part of his mind
returned to the morning he lay half-dead
in the Argonne Forest, awaiting help,
expecting deliverance, counting upon
a fellow Marine ~ but no such hope
supported him now. He was on his own.
He ripped that abomination, that tube
and needle, ripped it out of his vein
and, laying hold of the lamp like a club,
he raised a thunderous shout till a rain
of running feet on linoleum poured
indignantly down the hall to his door.

Like Bowie near death at the Alamo,
propped against pillow with pistol cocked,
the old man waited for faces to show
in the open door and launched his attack,
hurling bedpan, lamp and telephone
at the scrambling nurses. They had him packed
and escorted home within the hour.
That evening, dug in like a cornerstone
on his own farm, resolutely locked
against all reason, lord of his tower,
he defied his family’s threats and pleas
till they crow-barred the door and found him dead,
draped in a coat, sitting upright in bed,
a Winchester rifle across his knees.

Finally, in this last poem, I make a pilgrimage, in the company of my wife Marian, to the battlefield of Belleau Wood near the Marne River, where my grandfather fought in 1918  

THE TOWER AT THE EDGE OF THE WOOD

Demure, nestled fields so intensely green
they appear to float amid clouds of swallows…
shimmering fields of incipient wheat
awash with scarlet of poppies, like those
my grandfather mentioned. Here, where arises
on battlements of crag and ravine,
the huge and shadowy bulk of a wood,
a sole brigade of Americans met
the army that swept towards Paris and stood
against it, dying by hundreds. I stare
at its rocky defiles and crevices
till my scalp begins to tingle and crawl.
My grandfather spoke of the poppies here,
how petals by hundreds would break and fall ~

how every sullen recess of the wood
flickered a vicious flame ~ how a mighty
moan arose from the ranks as poppies,
soldiers and grain were cut down together
till not one man or stalk of wheat stood ~
how those still breathing cringed behind bodies
crumpled or sprawling ~ how raking fire
shredded their haversacks and pinned them
close to the earth ~ how strangely, somewhere,
the note of a warbler, piercingly clear,
emerged for a moment above the din ~
how the fire hit them again, again,
as curse accompanied prayer ~ how cries
of the wounded tore the heart with pity.

Grandfather never spoke of such dying
directly ~ there were clipped allusions,
disquieting, never intentional
and, often, there was the lapse of silence
that fell like frost on the otherwise green
and pastoral heart of each reminiscence.
Mostly what he imparted were small
vignettes and stories of commonplace things
reassuring to any farmer’s son:
how he stole up into the loft of a barn
with a bottle ~ how he hauled ammunition
on a night so dark that he walked his team
by the flare of shells ~ how he stole a swim
while washing his lathered mules in the Marne.

One evening he held the porch like a stage
for a crowd of us boys and told of the time
that he turned an all-but-terrified team
straight in the teeth of a rolling barrage ~
how he calmed the creatures, holding reins taut
in his left hand, with a watch in his right
and, timing the march of the fiery wall
that bore upon them until the earth shook,
how he barked a brusque command to his mules
and bullied them straight through the coiling smoke.
But there was a darker side to the war
not found in his tales or among his letters,
or even between the lines of the battered
diary stashed in the back of a drawer.

In all his words there was nothing of what,
years afterward, while exhuming the past
in the cold crypt of an archival vault,
I found by chance in a written account
by a young corporal in Grandpa’s detachment:
he told how the dead lay in summer heat
all swollen and black ~ how soldiers were sent
on burial parties, not from a sense
of rightness, but only to stop the stench ~
how, unceremoniously, they tossed
the corpses in shell-holes ~ how when they pulled
on limbs they could feel the joints separate ~
how flies buzzed up from the flesh in a cloud ~
how, mostly, the bodies were left to rot.

Such images weltered up in a flood
as our taxi turned through the somber gate
some minutes ago and proceeded straight
through a corridor of identical trees
and bordering hedges of clustered roses.
Directly before us, positioned midway
up the side of a hill, in a brooding wood,
an immaculate, white, unworldly tower
commanded a field of white marble crosses.
As we stepped from the car, the driver leaned out,
explained he would wait for us one hour,
and turned off the meter. At our surprise,
he told how his father had also fought
on the Marne, and with that he looked away.

In the years just after the war they came
by the thousands here ~ the parents, widows,
and fatherless children ~ to walk among rows
of crosses in search of some single name
out of all the rest ~ and there came, as well,
the soldiers themselves: alone, in pairs
or, ever more frequently through the years,
together with wives. For months afterward,
Grandfather talked of a long journey back,
of showing my grandmother what had occured ~
of trying to show what he couldn’t tell.
But he gave it up ~ with too many rows
of his own to walk, too much acreage, stock,
and too little savings, too little time.

When, long after that, I asked him whether
he might still return, he said, with a frown,
“That was decades ago. Your grandmother’s gone.
Nothing would be the same.” I remember
the way he looked out at the evening sky
as though he might peer through miles and years
to those far-off events, and how I arose
from the sofa and silently left the room.
And now, what a strange, ironic turn
that it should be I and not he who has come,
and my wife rather than his who should see
this place of all places. ~~ She takes my arm
and, almost touching her lips to my ear,
quietly whispers, the circle is closed.

We wander along the avenue, dazed
by the sheer translucency of the air,
by all the surrounding miles of wheat
and myriad poppies, by wheeling arcs
of swallows suffused in light. Everywhere
we turn it is almost as though we gaze
upon the first morning before there fell
the first intimation of any night.
My wife, knowing little of what has passed
in this sorrowful wood, sees it most of all
as a beautiful and mysterious place
and, venturing off on her own to where
a stair rises dimly into the dark
of the trees, she slowly climbs out of sight.

And now for the first time I am alone,
alone in that place of legends to which
my grandfather always longed to return,
a place of apocalyptic fury,
carnage and devastation… a place
of villages and reclusive pastures
and rivers that haunted him all his days.
At the close of this wrathful century
which he, as a boy, observed at its dawn,
I have come in his place to stand and watch
at post, as a cloud moves over the sun,
as a shadow moves slowly across the face
of the tower that stands like an ancient cairn,
marking the derelict bones of warriors.

I cross a rectangular swath of lawn
to the base of the hill where, step by step,
I mount an austere and gradual stair
to the terrace that foots the tower and stop
to face the imposing arch of a doorway.
Passing beneath an armored Crusader
surrounded by archivolts like a fan,
I find myself standing within a small,
obscurely-lit chapel. The afternoon sun
inclines through narrow, faceted windows
of tinctured and leaded glass, muted rays
of colored radiance slanting through air
to hallow, in auras of blue and rose,
names of the missing chiseled on walls.

Since before the last war these ghostly rays,
pivoting on axes of window-glass,
have cloven the cloistered air of this place,
their indiscernable movement across
the walls precisely in opposition
to the arc of the sun across the sky.
In shadow, a Gothic altar of brass
and marble stands recessed in an apse,
presenting a stark, solitary cross.
I turn from its presence and wander out
into warmly showering light, a vision
of uninterrupted tranquility
rising above me: a sky without cloud,
a single swallow that soars and dips.

I watch, completely absorbed in its flight
till it skirls into aether, and then I turn
and follow the terrace around the wall
of the tower from where I can see, above,
the stairway vanishing into the wood.
The air is less cordial here, with the sun
eclipsed by a circuit of conifers
closing on every side. A residual
atmosphere, haunted and unresolved,
hovers about their boughs and they brood
like portals opening into the night,
into a purgatory of craters,
of trenches and dugouts clouded with fern,
of corroded cartridges, buckles, spoons.

But there are are darker ravines in this wood
where more survives than detritus of war,
where memory stains the air and where cries
of huddled and immaterial forms
are like shuddering leaves… ~~ She catches my eye
from the stairway, suddenly stepping forth
from out of the shadows, a strange, uncertain
regard on her face that makes me afraid.
I rush up to meet her. She grasps my arm
and urges me rapidly down the stair
toward the waiting taxi. I pull her near
and ask her to whisper what she has seen ~
she turns with a look that is oddly removed ~
her eyes are unaccountably grieved.