The young man, hardly more <br />than a boy, who fired the shot <br />had looked at him with an air <br />not of anger but of concentration, <br />as if he were surveying a road, <br />or feeding a length of wood into a saw: <br />It had to be done just so. <br /> <br />The bullet passed through <br />his upper chest, below the collar bone. <br />The pain was not what he might <br />have feared. Strangely exhilirated <br />he staggered out of the pasture <br />and into a grove of trees. <br /> <br />He pressed and pressed <br />the wound, trying to stanch <br />the blood, but he could only press <br />what he could reach, and he could <br />not reach his back, where the bullet <br />had exited. <br /> He lay on the earth <br />smelling the leaves and mosses, <br />musty and damp and cool <br />after the blaze of open afternoon. <br /> <br />How good the earth smelled, <br />as it had when he was a boy <br />hiding from his father, <br />who was intent of strapping him <br />for doing his chores <br />late one time too many. <br /> <br />A cowbird razzed from a rail fence. <br />It isn't mockery, he thought, <br />no malice in it... just a noise. <br />Stray bullets nicked the oaks <br />overhead. Leaves and splinters fell. <br /> <br />Someone near him groaned. <br />But it was his own voice he heard. <br />His fingers and feet tingled, <br />the roof of his mouth, <br />and the bridge of his nose.... <br /> <br />He became dry, dry, and thought <br />of Christ, who said, I thirst. <br />His man-smell, the smell of his hair <br />and skin, his sweat, the salt smell <br />of his cock and the little ferny hairs <br />that two women had known <br /> <br />left him, and a sharp, almost sweet <br />smell began to rise from his open mouth <br />in the warm shade of the oaks. <br />A streak of sun climbed the rough <br />trunk of a tree, but he did not <br />see it with his open eye.<br /><br />Jane Kenyon<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/gettysburg-july-1-1863/
