Nov '02 [Home] 12           Day of Remembrance ~ Rob Wright      Ancestral Refrain ~ Rebecca Seiferle           Cantus for the Horses ~ Rob Wright

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Day of Remembrance Rob Wright A parade:  small, nearly single file; the players unsure, feminine, even the boys, with their thrust-out necks, and yard-high busbies. The brass they carry is too bright to be looked at directly, but this may be a trick of art, or memory. Light blankets the road. The blacktop blisters into fragile water-filled spheres. The sunburned heads of old men glow like raw berries. The gloves of the drummers pause before the roll. I feel the pause, before the rattle of snares, the b' leet ' leet gravel pops. The piping and uniforms, the fingerprints on brass, are strangely out of place; there are no shops, no cinemas here, no entertainment at all but church. The people of the town don't know what's expected of them; I watch them look, one to another, one woman amused, another solemn. A tight-lipped man, whom I only see in his front-row pew on Sunday, scans the crowd. I expect he's organized all this, invited the band — strangers here; this town is family more than anything, half are cousins, brothers, sisters, aunts. The band plays flourishes. Grand this! Grand that! And although I wasn't born here, (possibly because I wasn't) the brass and uniforms look oddly obscene, like public drunkenness. The tight-lipped man finds the smiling woman. His niece, I think. Before he can say anything, the town begins to march. The cemetery is on a hill, outside the town, like in a story, but also in what people call memory — my memory — that odd possession that owns me more than I own it. We walk through clear air. The graves have been cleared of weeds and gorse, and tattered flags exchanged for fresh. I'd often wondered why people put flags on graves, making a square of grass, clay, and grubs a sovereign nation. Now I know. Each member of the band stops playing as they pass the iron gates. Only the bass drum, with its beat like a cranial pulse, and a trumpeter remain. The drum stops. The trumpeter plays a volontaire, sourly, notes spit into brass. No one speaks. The cousins, sisters, brothers, aunts look down. There is nothing, not even in the odd language of prayer, to describe the strangeness of this. The wind brows into the horn's bell and chokes off all sound; it flutters back. The smiling woman is now weeping, but whether from mirth, or an emotion more appropriate to the occasion, it's impossible to tell. In an adjacent field, a farmer cuts hay. No one has invited him, or he does not care. He's solitary, and like me, unrelated to the others. His tractor turns and makes another row. Swallows circle above the dust and scoria, in a fly-catch dance of copperplate loop and arc. Maples sprouted up though timothy, are cut down and spat out. The smell of hay, exhaust, and gasoline reaches me as the trumpet's solo ends. By the time prayers are said, the harvester has moved so close that swallows fly over graves, fantailed, white-bellied, swallowing. I repeat the litany and try to make words I know too well honor the dead I never knew at all, but can't and follow, swallowing. [On the second Monday in November, the fallen are honored in the United States and Canada. Every seventh year, that day is the author's birthday.—Eds.] ~ . ~ Ancestral Refrain Rebecca Seiferle I hate the sound of the bagpipes. Each morning as we go from lecture hall to classroom, dozens of children, bussed in to practice for a week, march up and down, pumping their arms and elbows like flightless birds trying to take flight, changing their individual breaths into a chorus of keening, dirges mourning, the piercing of Scottish war songs. Yet, the woman who turns to me this morning is rapturous at being Scot. "It's so serene, that lilting refrain, it reminds me of my heritage," her face tilts like that white island catching the breaking sun. "It's Gary Owen," I choke out, "the damned song Custer played before each 'battle.'" Such élan swinging into the waking hours, the bayonets flashing along the banks of the Little Washita, though by then the music was silent, slicing into the tents of the sleeping Cheyenne. The fighting itself lasted only a few minutes, though it took hours to finish off the warriors hiding in the brush, then to slaughter all the horses, for the army first tried to cut their throats, but the animals were too afraid of the smell of the white men, so the cavalry called for more ammunition—it took 800 rounds to kill all the horses—and Custer's final tally listed 103 fighting men killed. In truth, only 11 could be so classified… the other 92 were women, children, and old men. We're both startled by my vehemence; her Scottish fingers twitch in her plaid scarf, as if trying to unravel that loose thread of undisclosed genealogy. Still she pleads, "I didn't know, it sounds so sweet," and "it's the voice of my ancestors." Of course, she's right, it is the voice of our ancestors— all war cries, in any language, the children rehearsing, trying to get just right, each note in a song of slaughter. (The 2002 winner of the Western States Award, Rebecca Seiferle edits The Drunken Boat.She lives in northern New Mexico.) ~ . ~ Cantus for the Horses Rob Wright On June 18, 1815, at a crossroads between Grande Alliance and Waterloo, 50,000 men and 10,000 horses were killed in an afternoon. I The rye tops have been bleached in the heat blond. Milkweed pods and thistle down as fine as the unnamed fluff on a baby's neck fly. The hay is ripe. Time for the first cut but horses and soldiers have been trampling the fields so that for miles it looks as if a squadron of ships had been dragged by a drunken giant up this hill and down that. A girl in homespun lies on her back knees up as if left for dead and well she might. Flies light            take off            light. Grooms polish tack and lather leather burnished chestnut by the backsides and thighs of scarlet riders. The smell of soap and pond water is a comfort but not one of them foul-mouthed and stinking of sweat, dried grass, hot wool would admit to this. Horses are tethered in a long column. The ground has been scoured to dust by prehensile lips snapping            clodding Bridles and blankets off they're oddly naked and feminine even the odd stallion with a prick pink as a coronation gown. A clutch of sunburned men with brass hats, like firemen ride cannons to the front. The mud stains on their backsides are the shape of crocuses. II Whistles.            Shouts. The grooms point to horsemen cantering up the valley road polished pretty, chrome flashing sweethearts signaling through the haze. French horses coming over at mid-day as if for tea. The cannons fire. Instantly the ear squeezes down a puckering sphincter except for the central ringing and a worm-hole of pain. The grooms hop behind the guns like barn kittens looking for a nipple. The cannoneers work like midwives trading buckets, rags wiping out steaming holes. Shot is carried in a blanket like an iron 'Christ the child.' Men are barely clear the barrel when the firing hole is touched. A tree branch, three horses brass kit, sabers, riders       fall as if on cue. The French stand like idiot children left at a cross-roads and take a volley up the middle. A cannoneer who has found the time to strip to the skin waves them off. They stand and take another. The            horses         fall           slowly legs            body           neck last the head like a rug full of dust. The midwifery at the guns goes on sulphur smoke, smoldering grass air as thick as a bathhouse, mad laughter stops not by command but as if everyone had run out of things to kill at the same instant. III More than blasted trees more than the tatter of bone and wool more than the legs sprouting up like weeds what I see are horses. One has fallen not ten feet from the water carriers belly up, eyes reflecting the wide sky legs moving slowly still running. (Outstanding Semifinalist Poem (Reach):  Lyric Recovery Festival™ at Carnegie Hall, 2000) (Rob Wright is a regular contributor to the magazine. [Masthead]) [Photo source.]