Ice-crystals, rubies cracked with refracted light, Or all vast death like a wide field in ten short lines. She writes to the tough, swart-minded Higginson Minding his negro troops in a lost bayou, “War feels to me like an oblique place.” A man Dreams of a sky machine that will match the birds And another, dusting the shelves of a country store, Saves his pennies until they turn into dimes. (Anything’s realer than war.) A dozen men Charter a railroad to go all across the Plains And link two seas with a whistling iron horse. A whiskered doctor stubbornly tries to find The causes of childbed-fever⁠—and, doing so, Will save more lives than all these war-months have spent, And never inhabit a railway-station tomb.

All this through the war, all this behind the flat screen.⁠ ⁠…