Old Bill George
chews tobacco, tips a broad-brimmed dusty
black felt hat and says,
—I was top sergeant.
They kiled the captain and the two lieutenants,
for eight months the company was mine—
Sergeant Bill George, wounded at Chickamauga,
prisoner at Andersonville.
Dignity is an old man
dribbling tobacco on the yellow corners
of his moustache.
—Listen, Bill George (your skin is chína brown
your eyes empty, your hands gentle and long
as a sea mist falling) you ran away to fipht,
cheated your neighbors, drank, had bastards, say?
—Maybe. I can’t remember. A long time ago.
I used to find him in the Presbyterian
graveyard, limping under the cedars
spelling over a tomb.
—Humpty Mert Miller
ran a water sawmill im Pine Flats,
a hard man, a good hater, died fighting drunk.,
Bury me at his side.
Now Reverend Death when he comes driving through
Westmoreland County in his black three-seated
surrey, whoaing at a farm to shout,
—Jumpin, Elza… jump in, Can… there’s room—
(nobody dares to answer him)—
when Death
in his black suit and clerical collar turns
into Bill George’s lane, nobody speaks,
nobody moves but the old man chewing tobacco
thinking of his friends.
Bill George climbed into the surrey; took the reins,
and somewhere was a noise of lamentation—
grief without bitterness, a quiet moan,
old lonesome women weeping In every farmhouse
from Indian Meadows west to Cherry Tree.
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