The City, Our City. Wayne Miller

almost too soon it’s back to the work at hand.

      So when a gunshot taps at the room’s thin window,

      they hardly notice, and when the war slides in like a storm cloud—

      swallowing her up in its passing—he feels as if the damage done

      is not to the City or to them, finally, but to the painting.

      Then reconstruction is finished; a friend gives him a camera—

      and how he loves the idea of light striking the pictures into being.

      He begins to photograph the façades and alleys,

      the kiosks and cafés. Now the unfinished portrait haunts him;

      he brings it up from the cellar. And the photograph he takes of it

      at first is more to preserve his thoughts of those afternoons with her.

      But then the portrait floating in the fixer’s orange glow

      emerges into a sealed and beautiful distance.

      He blows it up and mounts it on fiberboard—and now

      in that enlargement, more clearly than ever,

      the image remains unfinished. He sets up the print on an easel,

      takes out his oils and brushes, and begins to paint—

       III

      ] and all wes then cleare, some faces

      hath shadowes in them. Mister Preacher

      marke the doores with crosses,

      and ere long there is no winde in me

      to stand on. Blesse us Lorde

      with soupe and wine, bread and water

      till we dye. And blesse Katheryn

      with her long thin handes. You I saw

      sucking the wordes from her mouth,

      the light from her skin [

A HISTORY OF WAR

      The fields buckled into earthworks,

      breastworks, and the men dug deeper

      into their ground. Of course, once

      the trenches were cut, they could not

      be moved—so the men adorned

      the bunkers with card tables, slicked

      the walls with posters, poured rum

      into mugs they’d brought in from town.

      Each morning, they stood-to, glared

      down their rifles, through the nets

      of barbed wire, the craters and corpses,

      the litter of branches, footprints

      and shells. Across the way, bayonets

      just like theirs aimed back, as if

      the parados propped mirrors, as if

      their own blackened faces were hard

      set against them. Over there, just

      as here, the color guard raised the flag,

      the captains sloganeered through

      their bullhorns. Everyone could hear

      the echoing, and everyone roared

      and shouted—because such words

      were the river that carried them deeper,

      that kept them from sinking.

      Then, as was the ritual, at nine,

      the men climbed down from the firestep,

      shot craps on the duckboards, read

      treatises in the dugouts on passion

      and Passchendaele. Anything to kill

      the time between assaults, to black out