ON THE WAY TO THE OFFICE
every morning crossing campus
I walk between the two tall buildings
where two deaths happened just months ago
one a suicide, one
possibly an accident
and I can’t look at the tops of the buildings
from which two men
descended through the air
nor do I want to walk too close to those walls
buildings absorb what happens there
at night as the walls shift and creak and sigh
are ghosts of fear or pain or desperate resolution
I don’t want them to touch me
I say a prayer for their souls’ peace
I walk down the exact middle of the street
***
THE OLD BOYS
are playing Civil War again, the great map
spread out on the table, the markers showing
wins, losses, disputed territory.
Grant and Lee sit across from each other,
best friends for forty years. Wives pass
home-baked cookies. What the war was like
no one wants to know, the agonized wounded,
the deaths from cholera and typhoid. The old boys
are happy in the comfort of their kitchen,
strategizing, shifting bits of paper,
glaring at the map and taking notes.
“Maybe the South will win this time,” one says.
—
Janet McCann’s work has been published in Kansas Quarterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou’wester, America, Christian Century, Christianity and Literature, New York Quarterly, Tendril, and others. A 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner, she taught at Texas A & M University from 1969-2016, and is now Professor Emerita. She has co-edited anthologies with David Craig, Odd Angles of Heaven (Shaw, 1994), Place of Passage, (Story Line, 2000), and Poems of Francis and Clare (St. Anthony Messenger, 2004). Her most recent poetry collection is The Crone at the Casino (Lamar University Press, 2014).
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