On Daniel Field, the Civil War's a hundred years behind us now.
Georgia's peaches and peanuts and twenty-eight hundred men
preparing to protect the states from Krauts. Half of them
have skin as dark as rose or oil of oleander, half sing
boot camp runaway blues to Oliver and Armstrong. These air
commandos stretch and pull for the worst--invasions
of the outland terrapin herself. Howsoever they manage it,
in a voice as deep as the cumulo-nimbus clouds are high,
they chant an ode so blathered and happy, it's made
of one solid stone of is--they jump-jack in perfect unison,
four, five, six; sixteen, eighteen, twenty, and twenty-one:
the tourniquet of love is a weapon of the soldier's arm,
the shield is each breath's syncopated act fanatic,
the sheep-shorn hair of a skull is a shy-worn promise,
the quickened heart is fodder for each new fist of family,
the blackened eye or tire-tread look is domesticity or bliss,
the art of birdflight is the navigator's winter compass,
the mind's pulsation is a bed for calamus and Spanish moss,
the lemon-assed beauty of recuits is goofy and dazzling,
the shadow of each athlete is an angel of the odd and obdurate;
each swell and jump jacks one cadet, alive and full and sexual.