`Alive Because We Look and Grieve'

I’ve visited Gettysburg many times, starting in 1963, shortly after the centennial of the battle. It’s among those rare places, like certain cemeteries and churches, that feel charged with significance. One speaks and walks softly. Talking too loudly would seem indecent. Antietam I’ve visited only once, in March of 1986. I was driving back to upstate New York after visiting a friend in Washington, D.C., and decided on a whim to walk the site of the bloodiest day (Sept. 16, 1862) in American military history. The afternoon was cold and windy, the trees still bare. Except for a park ranger, I was the only person at the battlefield. The sun was already low in the sky, and I didn’t have time for a full tour. The ranger, a black man, showed me the fabled cornfield. He spoke so softly, I wondered if he ever got angry enough to holler, but he seemed pleased to be talking again after a long quiet day. He knew the battle and battlefield deeply. I thought of him as I read this poem by W.S. Di Piero, “1864,” collected in Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems:

“Like true believers elated by what they’ve seen,
as if at the end of days, raptured away
like millions more of undying credence,
this Union soldier’s ankles crossed,
his ditch-mate’s demure arms folded
like an Annunciation angel’s,
others flank to flank, mouths catching flies –
how candid and unharmed they look,
these teens in O’Sullivan’s snapshot,
grimy mother-of-pearl faces
aspiring to another life or way or time,
who see where we don’t. Who among us can say
(we the quick, fattened, fed, sheltered,
alive because we look and grieve)
what they saw, what stiff promise
their brains made or erased,
or what millions today on TV will see
in empty combat boots spread on a lawn,
far from their desert, clownish and collapsed
for lack of feet they never fit quite right?”

“O’Sullivan” is Timothy O'Sullivan, a photographer who worked for Mathew Brady and was commissioned as a first lieutenant during the Civil War. His most famous image, “The Harvest of Death,” was taken within days of the Battle of Gettysburg. I’ve searched several photographic databases, looking for the picture most resembling the one described by Di Piero. I found one, titled “Spotsylvania Court House, Va., Bodies of Confederate Soldiers Near Mrs. Alsop’s House,” that was close, though Di Piero specifies a Union soldier. The youth of the dead men is obvious. Photos of Civil War dead seem not gruesome but deeply sad. Any photo captures a fleeting, unrepeatable shard of a second, and has poignancy built into it. O’Sullivan’s pictures and others from the Civil War are too heartbreaking to contemplate for long.

Di Piero renders this sense through most of his poem. Untouched by the immediate horror of the war, we look at these nameless men who died 144 years ago. We are “alive because we look and grieve,” and that is our duty. The poem’s last four lines fail because they can’t bear the weight of historical linkage Di Piero heaps on them. The strain turns the conclusion false and vaguely indecent. He comes close to betraying the dead, in a way O’Sullivan does not.