"...IT HAS PLEASED THE GOD OF BATTLES..."

General Dan is visiting
his leg

at the Military Museum
for 50 years now.

The one he lost
at Gettysburg.


Walt is visiting the wounded
and the many dying

at the Patent Office
press ganged into a makeshift

hospital
in glass cases

patents stare
at patients

"every kind of invention
it ever occured..."

the poet remarks
"into the mind of man


...to conceive."

A soldier laughs out loud
even as the President visits.

He has been handed
a religious tract

"The Sin of Dancing"
he who

has
no legs.

A crop of amputated feet
grows higher and higher.

How human are
a man's toes.

A dead Confederate
is dragged into position

to make
a better photograph.

Bushfires rage
through the Wilderness.

The scream of the wounded
being burnt alive

begging to be shot
"Did we or did we not

do all
that men could do>"

Shot through the socket
the eye bulges out

both brothers and
yet both survive

Microscopium constellation
looks down upon

this world of men
amazed to find itself

nailed to the Museum's floor
by some man's art

sharing the space
with General Dan's lost leg

that still lives on
in its glass case.

Obscure and barely visible
to the naked eye

just like the constellation
of the dead.

Man now
in a museum

falls asleep with
a book upon his lap

"Lost, Missing and
Troublesome Stars"

Like a musket shot
it wakes the sleeper up

turns heads as
1863

becomes
2003