Man Be Well Traveled
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)
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