The City, Our City. Wayne Miller
almost too soon it’s back to the work at hand.
So when a gunshot taps at the room’s thin window,
they hardly notice, and when the war slides in like a storm cloud—
swallowing her up in its passing—he feels as if the damage done
is not to the City or to them, finally, but to the painting.
Then reconstruction is finished; a friend gives him a camera—
and how he loves the idea of light striking the pictures into being.
He begins to photograph the façades and alleys,
the kiosks and cafés. Now the unfinished portrait haunts him;
he brings it up from the cellar. And the photograph he takes of it
at first is more to preserve his thoughts of those afternoons with her.
But then the portrait floating in the fixer’s orange glow
emerges into a sealed and beautiful distance.
He blows it up and mounts it on fiberboard—and now
in that enlargement, more clearly than ever,
the image remains unfinished. He sets up the print on an easel,
takes out his oils and brushes, and begins to paint—
III
] and all wes then cleare, some faces
hath shadowes in them. Mister Preacher
marke the doores with crosses,
and ere long there is no winde in me
to stand on. Blesse us Lorde
with soupe and wine, bread and water
till we dye. And blesse Katheryn
with her long thin handes. You I saw
sucking the wordes from her mouth,
the light from her skin [
A HISTORY OF WAR
The fields buckled into earthworks,
breastworks, and the men dug deeper
into their ground. Of course, once
the trenches were cut, they could not
be moved—so the men adorned
the bunkers with card tables, slicked
the walls with posters, poured rum
into mugs they’d brought in from town.
Each morning, they stood-to, glared
down their rifles, through the nets
of barbed wire, the craters and corpses,
the litter of branches, footprints
and shells. Across the way, bayonets
just like theirs aimed back, as if
the parados propped mirrors, as if
their own blackened faces were hard
set against them. Over there, just
as here, the color guard raised the flag,
the captains sloganeered through
their bullhorns. Everyone could hear
the echoing, and everyone roared
and shouted—because such words
were the river that carried them deeper,
that kept them from sinking.
Then, as was the ritual, at nine,
the men climbed down from the firestep,
shot craps on the duckboards, read
treatises in the dugouts on passion
and Passchendaele. Anything to kill
the time between assaults, to black out
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