For Melville, on Malvern Hill the elms would speak
tetrameter to orient the infamy that day. For others,
brothers tromping stone-arc aqueducts to Fredericksburg,
the eye of the soul on ice is still. Here, near Samuel
Mumma's farm, the white-brick Dunker Church
is an Anabaptist seat of fire, off one lumbering
Sunken Road, taking hits from both sides--this is
a hospice for amputees and aftermath. It's trine
immersion for each viewer, three times backed
by verse, image, music of an antebellum troposphere:
father, son, no Holy Ghost. The limber chest
is empty, artillery spent on the 23,000 who died
in a border slave state's Pyrrhic song. Besides
McClelland's blister sores and Lee's bloodied eye,
there's nothing left but clarion call, bent over
a dozen dooryards where incantation blooms,
infesting the shoeless Confederate dead, painting
a mirror image of this picture: song of the I
one slave song past the height of the elms,
as they rain down leaf and seed upon what's
greening in this page of sediments and sorrow.