I breathe. The surgeon removes loose splinters 

of bone from the neighborhood of a soldier’s wound. 

A bloodless, brown-skinn’d face with eyes 

billowing in blue flame grit, he bears the operation 

in silence as the circular-cut saw does its talking 

to the wound in question. A February candle-light  

announces the impending winter night will encroach 

upon a legless patient shivering after three days 

on the Fredericksburg battlefield under a scorching 

Virginia sun — singeing an ultraviolet handprint 

onto a boy from the Brooklyn Fourteenth.

The confinement of a Ward E bed frame is now his home.

He delights before a stick of horehound candy 

I present to him. I stand back. Across the way, a nurse 

sits by a poor Massachusetts fellow. A bad hemorrhage 

that morning, she held a cloth to this mouth

as he cough’d up a smear of blood. So weak

he could only turn his head over on the pillow.

I wrote a letter to his mother a week before

when typhoid fever only plunder’d his body.

The constellations flicker on as the D.C. 

lamplighters travel the streets, filling in shadows 

along Pennsylvania Avenue where Lincoln 

slips into his sheets on the anniversary 

of Willie’s death. A Brockton native 

coughs up a smear of blood onto the white cloth. 

Reference

Walt Whitman. Memoranda During the War. Dover Publications, 2010. 10.