The new issue of The Battersea Review is packed with all sorts of great things: Robert Archambeau reviews T.S. Eliot’s Letters Vol. I; Saskia Hamilton reviews T.S. Eliot’s Letters Vol. II; Marjorie Perloff reviews T.S. Eliot’s Letters Vols. III & IV; R.P. Blackmur: 1954 Report to the Rockefeller Foundation, Edited by Allison Vanouse; John Wieners: Letters (with Poems) to Michael Rumaker, Edited by Michael Seth Stewart; Robert Archambeau on W.H. Auden’s The Orators; Marjorie Perloff on Ian Hamilton Finlay; Bill Berkson on Gertrude Stein; Richard Tillinghast on Edward Thomas; Flaminia Ocampo on Waldo Frank; James Dempsey on Scofield Thayer, Elaine Orr, and E.E. Cummings; Fiction by Leslie Hodgkins; Cassandra Nelson on Education; Daniel Sofaer on Henry Reed; Larissa Shmailo on Philip Nikolayev; Poetry: What’s Next: Robert Archambeau, Stephen Burt, Ben Mazer.
Portrait of a Stranger in Mt. Moriah Cemetery
1.
He surprises us, at first, but we follow him
Into last summer’s withered overgrowth.
It is All Saints Day, and the overcast
Sky drops a dented but gentle glow.
The vandals long ago gave up this place.
Decrepit row-homes lean over fallen fences.
Cheap siding slips from their sides
Like scales from hides of prehistoric fish.
Some children wake each day to this scene,
These avenues and blocks of the forgotten dead.
2.
He talks without looking back, then pauses.
Branches of a black ash push a whole family up.
Stray dogs bark and wail nearby, closer.
Sirens scream then stop. A train sounds its horn.
He carries a hatchet and heavy gloves.
He fought the Battle of the Wilderness,
Twice, and sailed a war sloop from Baltimore.
He talks to Fox News, and he keeps a blog.
He hangs around the Masonic Temple
And plays bagpipe music in his Volvo.
3.
He spends his weekends and holidays
Restoring small dignities to these
Plots of Grand Masters, frigate captains, grunts,
Sailors, cooks, great ladies and their servants,
Printers, furriers, bankers, cobblers, cops,
Their descendants long since moved far off.
Weather has brushed the names nearly away.
He observes a smudged star from a fire
On mausoleum stairs, charred beer cans black
Like shell casings in a sunken warship.
4.
A La-Z-Boy caves into a grave.
Seedpods crackle beneath. Thorns catch our sleeves.
He says the nation has grown decadent,
Devoted to luxuries of this world.
“We must prepare for luxuries of the next,”
He curses, scratching vines from a tomb’s bronze gate.
His hair has softened toward silver,
Like ash on our soles, powdered stone, petrified bark—
Like frost at dusk, or seams of cool white
In the fatty marble of a tombstone, overturned
And cradled by spiny weeds, incised
Long ago UNKNOWN in November’s minor light.
