Ceremonies

C-SPAN is the most tasteful, Fox the most apt
since I want to allude to Whitman:
“When Fox news last on the airways lied—“
but that is no sign of Spring.

They relish the symbol and tradition:
The riderless horse, the empty boots turned backwards,
and why the horses on the right side of the caisson's team are riderless too—
a military tradition: taking the cannon to the field,
they would carry provisions and, returning, bodies.

Detail and symbol,
the long procession,
flashing police, white gloved soldiers,
slow drums drumming…
(Is it Stalin? Is it Lennin?
No, one of ours.)
The flag wrapped coffin
with solemn step proceeds.

Along the route, the crowd in various attire,
cameras thrust above heads,
snapping tourist photos that will say,
"I was there." It is, after all, history being made.

Yet all those overgrown places
marked only by onmiscience,
history not so long gone to be forgotten,
not by the survivors,
(What must they think, seeing the white-gloved soldiers?)
and certainly not by us—but keep silent
One does not speak ill,
think of the family...
but if silence makes a saint... Fox is not silent.

And the band strikes "God Bless America"
one of his favorites, the broadcasters affirm.
God help America.
God save America.

As the procession reaches the capitol steps,
the missing man formation flies over, three times
"Order Harms!"
Ruffles and Flourishes,
Hail to the Chief,
a twenty-one cannon salute
you can almost smell the cordite—O, unsung sense
I wonder if the horses were fed this morning?

Flag and rotunda, monument and drum,
by conditioning are supposed to flood the heart with patriot drool,
then anoint, what?
a nice guy out of his depth?
a salesman, an actor,
a smiling, damned villain?
We cannot tell, and the truth is buried deeper
by the minute in the unanswered praises custom lavishes.

The widow looks breakable,
I hope pity is not misplaced—let me not learn of it—
and children cannot choose the parents they will lose—
This, of course, is why, in a civil world
I would hold my tongue though my heart broke for it;
but when care for the survivors becomes the wedge of double-think,
and what was said and unsaid to soothe a feeling becomes carved in textbooks
when to be silent is to acquiesce in ever returning lies
then I will remember those other widows,
those other orphans, other hundreds of thousands,
who saw their fathers,
their husbands,
brothers, sisters,
beloved ones,
O, not laid out in state,
not draped with flag and circumstance,
not carried from them on slow caissons,
with solemn drum,
and white gloved honor,
after life's own sweet, bitter decay and last, full measure,
but torn from the midst,
dragged and beaten,
mutilated, raped,
left for carrion,
meat beside the road,
(to know her torso by her shirt, flies and faded swoosh...)

or, perhaps, worst of all,
simply vanished.

Now our civil war hymn
what truth is marching on?
Will we put this face on a monument,
and raise no mark above the empty villages?
And what, then, shall we think of him
who’s poet's example I would follow if I could?

The flag covered coffin rests in the Rotunda's center;
the eulogies begin—one must not speak ill,
but the lie direct: "He brought freedom...?"
Was there no actual good he ever did?
If lies are said
at a somber occasion, in somber voice
does that make them true?
A chaplain too fond of alliteration intones:
"...to lift liberty's lamp until totalitarian towers tumbled"
Say that three times fast.

The choir sings "America"
while over all the flowing flag is superimposed.
I get up to make a snack.

The wreathes are brought in, the slow-stepping, white-gloved, honor guard,
the ropes drooping from their brass stands,
and the widow, escorted to the coffin,
smoothes the flag with wrinkled hands—a motherly gesture—
and pauses as if overcome, before turning
her fixed expression back to the cameras.

The coffin lies still in state, hidden by its flag,
hushed voices and footfalls as the viewers walk by,
kept at respectful distance by the ropes;
suits and uniforms, T-shirts and jeans,
a sweatshirt with "NYPD",
a man in a blue shirt and shorts turns to salute,
another in a broad-brimmed hat
he has forgotten to remove, or his convictions forbid;
a little girl with a flag on her shirt,
behind her, one with a Nike swoosh,
teens in baggy shorts, shirt-tails out;
a man in a striped shirt pushing a walker,
a woman in a black veil with prayerful hands;
sandals and tennis shoes and office casual,
America's fat and trim, bound by no ceremony,
arrive as they are, for separate reasons:
curiosity, sorrow, a desire to be in history
here in the rotunda's heart,
themselves a better emblem than all this day's pomp,
to view the flag that hides the coffin,
that hides the flesh that, living, hid the man.

The flow is halted, the president and first lady of these dark days
(he wearing a scowl he deems fit for sorrow;
it is a mere nastiness)
march brusquely to the coffin, kneel at its side, then leave.

The funeral at the National Cathedral;
a military band outside,
flags invade the sanctum
and are stood on the centers of the floor's inlaid crosses.
The choir sings "Jerusalem,"
now all is set on denying death—
which may not be, but the pretense we know is false,
the more desperate for being unsure,
Life ever after,
If we build uplifting stone, and fill it with incense and awe,
with emblem and genuflection,
if light flows from the colored glass,
and sculpture lives along the walls,
and the choir lofts a mighty homophony into organ thunder:
"Aufersteh’n, ja, aufersteh’n…!"
if we believe, if we clasp our hands, if we slay the infidel:
that will make it be true.
Irony that it could be, and the graves of all who died for blasphemy opened.
It is not faith that divides; it is lack of faith.
The eulogies always include a tale
to bring a little laughter, to endear—
a humanizing vignette—
and then the affirmation, "He's with the Big Guy, now."

But I must consider my own conscience:
Could it somehow have been worth it, his secret wars?
can millions on one side overbalance hundreds of thousands
on the other? Is an ordered machinery of destruction
more terrible than banditry?
Not if one life has infinite worth—
but then, how can we choose in a smiling damned world
that may not let us choose between life and death
but only between death and death?
not whether, but who, why, how many
and on what futile battlefields?
Is it right to make such choices?
Is it right to evade them?
If not, where does the long slope end;
was the Gulag a lesser Gulag,
the Evil Empire a lesser Evil Empire?

Again that Civil War hymn,
arranged with choir, fife and drums,
Even our poet president...
(Half a world away, Eisenstein and Prokofiev
created Ivan in apology for Stalin)

Did I say the lesser of evils is evil?
How glib, and how does that help when in the end we still must choose,
though the world come jack-booted with a grinning quandary?
Sophie had to choose, if only to save one.
If we are lucky to live upwind of the crematoria,
what shall we deem a good life?
Shall we adjust our nice new lampshades?
Shall we wash our hands with bars of soap?
Shall we pretend we do not know that ignorance is a choice,
that not choosing is a choice,
that detaching to the mountains to meditate upon good and evil,
or standing on the sidelines and writing poetry,
or going to the polls or not going to the polls
are all choices?
And every one of them reaches into the jungles and the deserts,
with unguessable consequence: in this bottomless world
we are all out of our depth
And still we must choose,
if only to save something.

"Amazing Grace,"
if some revelation would come.
I like to picture Captain Newton, not storm threatened,
but one placid, moonlit night,
drawn to look down his hold
and see with sudden, blood draining clarity
the awful business in which he was engaged,
(which flag and pulpit and the genuflections of society had condoned)
not shrinking from the burning scalpel that opened him to himself,
but falling in gratitude that, whatever the sear of knowing them,
some wrongs are plain,
some suffering can be heard,
that a single human sound—
a groan rising from the bowels of a ship—
can belie fife and drum, flag and monument
and all the drapery we are taught to revere,
that the truest pangs of the heart are those which
sympathy, not marches, invoke.

Led by the cross, the coffin returns to the military
the cathedral bell tolls forty times
and the peals repeat across the land.
At Andrews, they play "Hail to the Chief" and "Goin' Home,"
and salute with twenty-one guns, sharp in the blustering air.
The widow turns at the top of the steps and waves.
The great jet fades into the clouds.

The southern apologists made the same argument
as tyranny in our time:
"States Rights", "Internal Affairs";
both raise unfeeling abstraction above flesh and blood.

At the opposite sea, more cannons, more smoke,
more snare drums rolling,
the long motorcade procession to the valley,
for twenty miles the crowd
three-and-four deep on both sides.
A gathering of family, friends and dignitaries,
with military band and choir playing hymns await the coffin,
behind them, the sun sets across the hills.

The South would have none of better angels,
nor the fractal argument that secession secedes secession
as if affronted by reason, sought proof in blood,
whose anointing power makes wrong right and folly sacred.

“Amazing Grace” plays on that instrument of psychological warfare as the sigma-sided hearse arrives.
The white-gloved bearers, with slow, march place the coffin.
Eulogies from the children—the youngest son remarks the difference between
believing you have an obligation to God and a mandate from God,
surely, aimed at the narrow-eyed one, and I wonder whether he
sees his father being sanctified so a lesser man can shine by reflected glory?

Near final rest, the flag is at last removed;
the missing man formation flies out of the sunset.
(You hear the whisper of radios: "one minute out.")
The widow touches the mahogany
lays her cheek upon it and with her family gathered
around her, seems to let go tears. But this is not the last time, not the farewell:
The interment will not be televised.

Then invitees come by ones and twos
while the band plays hymns against a continuing drum roll,
and the sun behind fills the sky.
E, tu, Deus?

How far weapons have outnumbered crosses this day;
and how the emblem of force's vanity,
has been made to seem to want its defense.
The soldiers, standing at stiff attention,
white gloves by their sides,
who have surrendered their own questioning power—
What force are they meeting here?
What belligerence is threatened?
The force of argument. It is this day's bent
to overwhelm thought with magic,
and as the crisp warriors of the ultimate fallacy,
they stand rigid for more than they know.

The weakness of we who question is that we question,
while the worst…
As I struggle, this man is sanctified with widow's tears
and with every device, emblem and magic symbol of patriot ardor.
Now, we are kept silent out of respect—out of sympathy,
then, because you do not doubt a saint.

What I know is this:
That in one part of the world stands a marble tomb,
circled with marble and a nation's show of reverence,
in another, bones by the thousand
are sunk beneath the unremembering soil,
not as any measure of devotion to the cause for which they died—
they were simply caught between.
Their sole marble lies in the hearts of those who miss them
and do not know where to lay their wreathes.