In this way you look out on the perfectly painted sky… with nothing whatever between you & the landscape.
—General John Gibbon, Union army 2nd Corps
1.
Outside the Visitor Center—patrons queuing up in
khaki camo shorts, baseball caps, Where Big Bucks
Lie, boxes of MoonPies wheeling by—two black
men with rubber gloves, with Windex, on a July
Monday, polish the bronze Lincoln. His massive
hands. A crown of flies. The mothers kneel before
braided girls and deliver unto them their palms of
glistening sunblock. Five boys are pinned with
badges, are aiming their bottles of pop like rifles, at
Laura, quick to dive behind some benevolent skirt.
The fathers. Biceps white and Semper Fi–ed.
Faithful, always, to the easy turning away, the How
about those…. Finally, glass doors shirring wide, a
stream of air, cool as metal, admits the line inside.
2.
Step inside the center. Leave behind the liter-Cokes, boiled hot
dogs, the Skittles melting to a child’s palm. Leave behind the
texts, the seventh-grade history. See with what valor the men
in gray rise toward Pickett’s Charge to be picked from Earth
like ants. The argument is to remove simile from the picture.
To let realism reign. Look closer—the most exact feature is
made from abstract streaks. Blocks of color, blurred
brushstrokes. So faithful, from afar, veterans claimed it was he
who slumped against the oak’s good weight. We laid you / upon
your long bed, and our officers / wept hot tears like rain
and cropped their hair. The bayonets and buckles held a certain
gleam—tinsel. Workers hauled sod by the cartload, fixed the
foreground with relics. Fences, canteens. A shoe. None were
embalmed with honey. Their horses bloated under heavy rain.
3.
You see the horses first. One just fallen, on the dirt path toward Vicksburg,
dappled gray. His soldier crushed. A rebel cuts another from the carriage’s
ropes. Foreground: blood along a tawny neck. One—white, majestic—bucks
his rider, is always bucking his rider, forever, from history. Might it be easy to
look away from the surgeon’s bone saw. From the man slung between two
others like a sack of flour. The barn wall left gaping, red brick exposed around
the edges. Like flesh. The stone wall singed black. Meade holds and holds, but
barely. Cannons bruise the air, the open field (Lt. Col. Franklin Sawyer, Eighth
Ohio) moans. The grey wave crying / unearthly lamentation over the water
of the wheat, the rippling smoke. Never can the low stone become crossable.
Never can the blond youth slump back atop his steed, the saber unstick itself
from the rib-gap, nor the flesh above the knee. It’s hard not to admire the
trees—dwarfing our toy drama. They rise in plumes, toward…some thing.
Three hundred seventy-seven feet of canvas tacked around the room.
4.
When Boston tired of viewing the battle, it took an entire day just to roll up the canvas. Poor
panorama. Poor painted soldiers molding in a vacant lot, history too large to store—all its tons. Poor
Paul Philippoteaux who chose this moment to paint (tattered gray, death march across the farm’s slow
fences) as if it could have been otherwise. As if the South hadn’t only overshot (visibility poor
for smoke, bullets sailing over the high blue caps) here. How art makes its masterpiece regardless, its
illusion. In the round room, a narrator seals us inside our fate. The lights dim. The smoke pours
through the landscape beautifully (rosy-fingered, almost)—we hear the cannons first. Then dawn
speeds up. We’re flung straight through to lyric. We, astonished readers of history, lean forward. But
the thick railing holds us back. Denies the moment. We are some shameless wheel, churning clockwise
around the room. Once we spoke respectfully, in the lobby, of grandchildren, two-for-one
specials, cold beer. It was before these men were born. Before the cotton-boll split its firm seed for
canvas. Before the pines were tapped for turpentine. We ascended the escalator’s soundless por-
tal once, didn’t we? Weren’t we gaping at the wall of ammunition glass-sealed below? Weren’t we
working the restroom’s hand dryers, queuing up for the show, tiring already of our astonishment?
5.
Georgia vets loved the show
the immutable charge where
they saw a new war a new
way to fix the past as if it
weren’t always lapping back
into chaos In the beginning how
the Heavens and Earth / Rose
out of Chaos how the ads sold
it Glorious Gettysburg in all
the Awful Splendor of Real
War Napoleon desired one
for each of his battles his
battles he called them but
what does art know of chaos
6.
“I know! It’s all so sad…I never could have
done it, march across, like, a wide-open field.
How many stadium lengths did he say? That
sounds right. No, that one’s Little Round Top.
Where we ate our lunch. What? Well, she can
hush! This isn’t church. These men weren’t
gods. I mean, they probably all owned slaves—
we shouldn’t feel that bad. They chose their
side, to fight. There wasn’t some draft. I’m sick
of reading about their valor. Yeah, I heard they
survived on horsemeat. Like, married their
younger cousins. I would have shot the
prisoners instead. Why even paint it, as if
they’re good? That isn’t my past.”
7.
So, if only in art, our past is good,
wrapped around us like a flag, if it is
something from which we have all
emerged, gods of no lasting evil, no
certain slur remaining across a
Baptist church, no hung epithet
from a state house, nothing sung
from the pink-faced Sigma Alpha
Epsilons in Norman, OK, en route
to the Azalea Ball, their belles
hoopskirted & waiting to rise, still,
from the South, (You can hang ’em
from a tree…There will never be a
___ at SAE) we are forgetful gods.
8.
Say the CSA wasn’t all in rags Say they
would have been in pretty good shape, in
gray Say a Gone With the Wind postwar
cliché may have gotten the best of us
(Say you didn’t swoon, one adolescent
winter day, for Rhett) Say the derby is
better with a wide brim, a julep refreshed
from a silver tray Say states’ rights Say
bellum Say it’s best to show the enemy a
little frayed Say a word more lovely than
magnolia Say we, for our part, will blot out the
memory / of sons and brothers slain Say Aunt
Jemima’s happy likeness proves the
plantation was okay Say it straight-faced
9.
Facing it, the cylindrical room that holds us close
to the past, you might forgive a little. As if,
antebellum, white and wealthy, with your father’s
father’s sprawling fields, you wouldn’t have let the
house staff serve you pheasant. The sold-out
showings prove this—in Atlanta and Pyongyang,
in the Kunstmuseum Thun and Berlin, Ohio—
how we have in us a taste for beauty and for terror.
Nowhere in these scenes—“prisons of paint,” one
patron remarked—is a young mother bending to
slip a child’s foot into a sandal. No expanse of
poppied hills. Vicksburg, Waterloo. We want to
think we are a benevolent kind. That we split the
canvas, stepped through all that past.
10.
“Not at all! That way’s south. It is disorienting at first. Yes, this is my
twenty-ninth visit, so I guess you could say I am. Of course—you
can’t beat Garryowen. I have dreams about their fish-and-chips.
Have you been here for Bike Week? Man, it’s wild. Thousands of
Harleys, the whole town growls. And on the Fourth, you’ll see three
Robert E. Lees sipping Bud Lights at the same bar! Chamberlain
peeling out of the McDonald’s parking lot. No, my wife would never
let me camp out with all those kooks. I only get one night. Why the
Civil War? My great-great uncle fought. Tennessee. I found it out on
ancestry.com. Oh, sure, let’s see…if you look closely, that soldier
there, he’s painted with Lincoln’s face. Shot dead, dragged—they
won’t tell you that. Why aren’t any of the soldiers Black? I guess I
never noticed. Don’t mention it! Right, just head straight down
Carlisle. And tell them Big Gabe sent you!”
11.
Augusts the coeds march Carlisle for orien-
tation. Their folks have taken the weekend
for an educational vacation, get drunk in
hotel bars. The fathers debate statistics from
their four-hour car-tours (“Lee lost thirteen
thousand five hundred at Chancellorsville,
not here!”) where the sons practiced affect
and yawned. Gathered on the cemetery’s
lawn, the freshmen snap photos of the
unmarked graves. In one, a young woman
waves an Eagles scarf. Another frames a
group of guys mimicking war. Such ease
with the past. Who wouldn’t trade marble
fact for one last night in a dimming dorm?
12.
The problem might be that art outlasts us. That
it casts us for a future eye. That it unmasks us
before a people we never knew. The problem
might be formal. A circle proposes a point at
which it is complete. Where you can meet your
spouse at the egress, step out into a cooling
Pensylvania night. The problem could merely
be some small desire to stand a little longer
inside the comfort of the room. Too, it could be
that, afterward, in bed, it is not the musket shot,
not the blood-soaked scene, the reason these
men fought that survives in your small talk, but
the way the artist so smartly painted himself
among it all, leaning against that tree.
13.
“I don’t see how you can be against it, those men all fought for a way of
life you never knew. Sure, those guys in blue get heaps of praise, but—
what’s that quote about books, and victors? You know what I mean.
That’s easy for you to say. What if some government thug showed up
tomorrow and took your nice job away? I mean, there’s truth to that. You
think Reconstruction was all fun and games? Did every three-year-old
granddaughter in a white bassinet deserve your blame? No, hey. Slow
down. I’m not saying slavery was okay, you’re putting words in my mouth.
I’m just saying that the South did suffer. And I’m not sure any veteran of
our country should be treated like that. Not American? Please. Brothers
fought brothers, and you’re saying one shouldn’t claim a country? That
their mothers didn’t have a right to weep? That we should just sweep away
the fact that Yankees bought up that cotton, that their machines were run
by kids? Lady, I’m not some ignorant hick.”
14.
Sometimes, it’s enough to make you love
your country. The girl’s face lifted to the
cyclorama’s drape of sky. The boy afraid
of the cannon’s noise. The parents
fumbling through a crude guide—they
could have gone to Disney World.
Cancun. But here, they have left their
backpacks, mandatory, at the visitor’s
desk. They obey the lines, hush properly
when the narrator’s recorded voice
unfurls the soldiers’ fates. They will drive
back, late, to Annapolis, to Jersey, the long
minivan haul to Cleveland, taking with
them some vision for future dreams.