"Nothing else—no infection, no war, no famine—has ever killed so many in as short a period."
—Alfred Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918
Prologue
After the first year, weeds and scrub;
after five, juniper and birch,
alder filling in among the briars;
ten more years, maples rise and thicken;
forty years, the birches crowded out,
a new world swarms on the floor of the hardwood forest.
And who can tell us where there was an orchard,
where a swing, where the smokehouse stood?
***
All ears, nose, tongue and gut,
dogs know if something's wrong;
chickens don't know a thing, their brains
are little more than optic nerve—
they think it's been a very short day
and settle in the pines, good night,
head under wing, near their cousins
but welded to a lower branch.
Dogs, all kinds of dogs—signals
are their job, they cock their heads,
their backs bristle, even house dogs
wake up and circle the wool rug.
Outside, the vacant yard: then,
within minutes something eats the sun.
***
Dear Mattie, You're sweet to write me every day.
The train was not so bad, I found a seat,
watched the landscape flatten until dark,
ate the lunch you packed, your good chess pie.
I've made a friend, a Carolina man
who looks like Emmett Cocke, same big grin,
square teeth. Curses hard but he can shoot.
Sergeant calls him Pug I don't know why.
It's hot here but we're not here for long.
Most all we do is march and shine our boots.
In the drills they keep us 20 feet apart
on account of sickness in the camp.
In case you think to send more pie, send two.
I'll try to bring you back some French perfume.
***
When does a childhood end? Mothers
sew a piece of money inside a sock,
fathers unfold the map of the world, and boys
go off to war—that's an end, whether
they come back wrapped in the flag or waving it.
Sister and I were what they kissed goodbye,
complicitous in the long dream left behind.
On one page, willful innocence,
on the next
an Army Captain writing from the ward
with few details and much regret—a kindness
she wouldn't forgive, and wouldn't be reconciled
to her soldier lost, or me in my luck, or the petals
strewn on the grass, or the boys still on the playground
routing evil with their little sticks.
***
To be brought from the bright schoolyard into the house:
to stand by her bed like an animal stunned in the pen:
against the grid of the quilt, her hand seems
stiched to the cuff of its sleeve—although he wants
most urgently the hand to stroke his head,
although he thinks he could kneel down
that it would need to travel only inches
to brush like a breath his flushed cheek,
he doesn't stir: all his resolve,
all his resources go to watching her,
her mouth, her hair a pillow of blackened ferns—
he means to match her stillness bone for bone.
Nearby he hears the younger children cry,
and his aunts, like careless thieves, out in the kitchen.
***
This is the double bed where she'd been born,
bed of her mother's marriage and decline,
bed her sisters also ripened in,
bed that drew her husband to her side,
bed of her one child lost and five delivered,
bed indifferent to the many bodies,
bed around which all of them were gathered,
watery shapes in the shadows of the room,
and the bed frail abroad the violent ocean,
the frightened beasts so clumsy and pathetic,
heaving their wet breath against her neck,
she threw off the pile of quilts—white face like a moon—
and then entered straightway into heaven.
(c) Ellen Bryant Voigt. All rights reserved.
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