七層下Seven Layers Beneath

Now ebbs the wind among the pines. The sun sets West of the Civil War. Only snow garrisons the frontier. Thin are the bald branches, like starved nerves of the ear. In the chilled hush the shrubs are listening.

At sunset, the ill-tempered crow in the birch trees.Begins to curse, in dissonant blasphemies, General Sedgwick with the broken sword. Startled and strained are the statued ears.

Featured are the rocks; masks hide behind masks. Soon will rise the cold fog, and under the biotite sky. Will nibble the dews the marrow of the guns. In the rusted silence where mildew creeps.

After the war asleep are the stains of
blood. Mute are the bugles, mute the neighing horses that shied. After the war the vastness of a battlefield. Is listening to a lone, late crow.

Then rises Sirius from between teeth of battlements. The weighty sense of Time cumulated falls. On my fatigued collar bone. Also falls. The night, slippery down my icy face.

Softly I tread. Softly, on seven layers of autumn dead. Seven layers of leaves, crisp and sobbing beneath the shoes, Till trod and broken lie all the heart-shaped designs, All the insistences and futilities.

WISDOM SURVIVES PASSION. Ah, exile roaming the battlefield.
There is no past for you, no, not a bit. Now Continent is still too new, past there's none for you.
Your past is west of the sunset, west of it.
Devil’s Den,Gettysburg

* I visited the United States for the first time in 1958, when studied creative writing at the State University of lowa. I went there again in 1964 as a Fulbright Visiting Lecturet at several colleges, among which was Gettysburg Clolege, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, near the famous Civil War battlefield of 1863. The poem is entitled “Seven Layers Beneath” because in my imagination the seven years that had intervened between my first and second visits to the U.S. had piled up under my feet seven layers of fallen leaves.