Pilgrimage

 
Vicksburg, Mississippi


Here, the Mississippi carved 
    its mud-dark path, a graveyard 

for skeletons of sunken riverboats. 
    Here, the river changed its course, 

turning away from the city 
    as one turns, forgetting, from the past—

the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up 
    above the river’s curve of loss—where now

the Yazoo fills the Mississippi’s empty bed.
    Here, the dead stand up in stone, white 

marble, on Confederate Avenue. I stand
    on ground once hollowed by a web of caves;  

they must have seemed like catacombs,
    in 1863, to the woman sitting in her parlor, 

candlelit, underground. I can see her 
    listening to shells explode, writing herself 

into history, asking what is to become 
    of all the living things in this place?     

This whole city is a grave. Every spring—
    Pilgrimage—the living come to mingle 

with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders
    in the long hallways, listen all night 

to their silence and indifference,  relive 
    their dying on the green battlefield.

At the museum, we marvel at their clothes—
    preserved under glass—so much smaller 

than our own, as if those who wore them 
    were only children. We sleep in their beds, 

the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs, draped
    in flowers—funereal—a blur 

of petals against the river’s gray.
    The brochure in my room calls this

living history. The brass plate on the door reads 
    Prissy’s Room. A window frames 

the river’s crawl toward the Gulf.  In my dream 
    the ghost of history lies down beside me, 

rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.