Bite off the hand and eat gold
From the dead arm of the Antietam soldier
Leave him on the lawn
In between the poles of ash
In the litter and Moses Wagon
They’ve drawn
Shear off your whiskers, anchorite, with metal noises
With the badge of confederate stripes
Your woman with high cheekbones
And pinched, Guatemalan eyes,
They split her open like a melon, and her eyes rolled back in her head—
They all used her good
Now paint a smile on her
And put her in the ground
Tucked as a pea,
A bump uncomfortable
for posterity
to sleep on
And after trading the bad specie
For new,
Shed the woman (still a note not made)
the gray coat and the bivouac,
Pulling up the rails behind you
Move to California (for
You were always Western in heart.)
You have hard tack in bags and
The Yankee’s gold chips
Raze the old mill house
And birth a livery
Tend horses for the unioners
Riding in with bloody uniforms,
Toothless mouths,
Spotsylvania-
Spittle covered hard stories
Clean the boxes with her portraits
And bury them all with the dead green rinds
Bury another dead wife and another
plucking from each sad one,
blueberry of a southern son
and they will call the business theirs in time
And history will then always know you,
Distinguished gentleman with a beard
(Originally posted July 29, 2007)
Beauty is Imperfection 
I’m adding a gloss to my poem 11 years after its first publication. (It had sat unpublished on my computer for many years before that. I don’t even remember when the first draft was done.) While I am still proud of this little verse, I feel the need to make some clarifications about it, since it was written with some knowledge, if not complete knowledge, about the Lost Cause ideology of the American South and the Confederacy. The depiction of a genial antebellum Southern world has at various times in U.S. history re-emerged like a pestilent weed to tempt the popular imagination, usually at times people are frustrated by modernity and change–and especially at times when African-Americans make strides toward full equality and dignity (a gap that has narrowed but is in no way close to closing, as George Floyd’s murder by the hands of police officers shows).
One of the most unfortunate periods of this atavistic revival of Old Southern honor in art was during the second decade of cinema in the 1910s and 1920s, when the questionable historiography of an idyllic South with happy slaves was to pollute not only our literature but also the new art of film, one of the most powerful mediums ever invented. (I was shocked to hear that Buster Keaton didn’t make his 1926 Civil War film “The General” with a Union hero because Confederates were simply more sympathetic protagonists at the time.) Without a full understanding of that history, it might be possible for my poem to be misread as a sympathetic view of the slave-holding South rather than a poetic rumination on how Americans always reinvent themselves (that being one of the most American of qualities) and how the South reinvented itself to save face (and gloss over the fact that its entire existence was based on violence over black people’s bodies, the horrific removal of their children, the crushing of their humanity to serve an economic engine and white supremacy).
I believe in the literary tradition of anti-heroes–that narrating the audience into the life of morally questionable characters with morally indefensible beliefs is the best way to hold bad ideas to the light. The bad words are spoken because the audience understands their badness. My portrait here was of a fictional person who fought for the south, witnessed wartime brutality at the hands of the enemy (as all soldiers do) and left his home morally oblivious to his country’s sins and his own place in history so that he could go somewhere else and make himself into something different. A “distinguished gentleman with a beard” is the image he gets to leave to posterity. I’ll let you pass judgment on him. It’s not my job. It’s for the same reason I do not think the character of Tony Soprano, a murderous mafia boss, has to be explained to the audience or judged by his creators. Nor do they need to be afraid that the truth of his evil will be covered up by six years of humanizing him. That is what makes the art so great: How we become accustomed to evil and normalize it. We have only to look at our current political landscape to see that we all make compromises with morality to suit our interests.
I trust my readers to know that judgment about the character in this poem is vouchsafed to them as my creation speaks the reality he knows without some moralizing over his shoulder from me that would weaken the piece. But just in case there’s any confusion: The protagonist in this poem doesn’t know what world he’s in. And I feel more morally obligated to know mine.