“There are certain things that will cling to me, But not the things that I thought would cling, And the wound in my body cannot sting Like the tame black crow with the bandaged wing, The nervous eye and the hungry craw That picked at the dressing-station straw Till I was afraid it would pick my eyes And couldn’t lift hand to beat it off. I can tell the ladies the usual lies Of the wild night-duels when two scouts clash And your only light is his pistol-flash; But I remember a watering-trough Lost in a little brushwood town And the feel of Black Whistle slumping down Under my knees in the yellow air, Hit by a bullet from God knows where⁠ ⁠… Not the long, mad ride round the Union lines But the smell of the swamp at Seven Pines, The smell of the swamp by Gaines’s Mill, And Lee in the dusk before Malvern Hill, Riding along with his shoulders straight Like a sending out of the Scaean Gate, The cold intaglio of war. ‘This is Virginia’s