From the Archives : Verdun (June 2007)

Initially written on a roadtrip to France in June 2007, revised in August 2016. Pictured above: unexploded stick grenade found in old trenchline at Verdun.

Here — where magpies pant and yawn

and newborn calves are clodden tropes licked into form

as worms writhe scalded

                    in simmering lymecrush of gravel roads —

the Argonne remains like a Titan primordial

                    and without legend

                                        turned to earth in its sleep,

                    having let man thrash on chest, lip and tooth

then clutched him, ground his bonepulp,

                                                       never spat him back out. 

To stand on the grass is like being  

                    abovedeck on a channel ferry

rocking over what endless weaving and digesting below,  

undulation of the forest’s slowdrawn breaths —

here it feels like the earth might rise

                    and hillocks as waves crest and barrel you down,

the branches and stonefists frozen midattack

until a hiker trips the trapwire —

                    a word said to themselves

                                                            under their breath

as incantation sudden sparks the doomfed thresh

                    that looms beneath bark and leaf — folded in air.

Like bogwheat bodies the windfall and foliage

discourses its cause,

                    lichenchar branch and moss too welcome take

                                                            the lives of those

who’ve passed through them, fallen

                    down this stripnet, thorn and soil

searching the laven fallow matter of each human fate

its few memories whose cells roots take

                    and all else exhaled — let go to soil and sky.

Here is nothing that abides knowing, no genera but like faces

                    of the killed the forest took to wearing,

gazing through their skinless looks like

curtainfall and seeming leaves (all masks being one in rot)

and kept only the eyes. Sprigpierced, they blossom

to flesh the Spring’s revision

                    slurred, swollen and pollensweet.

These vales and ridges of fleshfed verdure, sown over

                                                            with mossy reaving birches

rendered in shades of cypress, groves as hem the yesteryear sun —

no cairn for the battalions, the boys stamped out

                                        and cooked alive in bunker hearths

with the happenings of years come after

                                        slaved in the underbrush.

                    The trunks of the eldest trees split in shell burst

suffuse with mustard gas (that purest flowering

bud of our artifice, its petals that pick apart the lovelorn instead)

                    the heartwood decaying, the marrow rings

exposed to weathering time and the humane age declared

stillborn, a gruesomest curio for the cabinet, as the tags are reaped

                                        in the scansion of battle

and other spoils as moles mutely

                    traduce to oilsledge of dirt.

Not a word staked but the grain to which a soldier

given to the battlefield rounds off

                                        and breaths expelled

of so many yelling weeping no — no line could engirdle

                    the exploded ribcage, the violence men thought holy

of triggers pulled

                                        with no period retaining the fatality’s

number finite as air — no where to begin the count.

Though how can I claim I saw anything

                    not imagined solely in the saying —

sloping hills terminating above

at valley’s rim, the far ridges whirring leaflush and yawning

with pale trunks, bursts of slurred green

                                        strafing nightlike recesses

beneath so much canopy — roaming this speeding vantage

that blurs my sight running out of itself

leaving but grass the same as everywhere to rush its sawtooth

                    against the sky as I go on with my forehead

hampressed on the booming glass — passenger

window of a rented car.