police cars and firetrucks
dashing every whichaway
helicopters overhead
bring daylight back
to intersections in our neighborhood
and listening to all the forces mass
then go away
the night becoming quiet once again
except for one maddened little dog
barking and barking his defiance
or perhaps his triumph
he after all is still here
and in possession
after the helicopters
squad cars and fire engines have left
for no reason that I know
my mind reconstructs
the famous massacre at St. Jovain
invented by a team of artists
two painters
two poets
a novelist and an historian
a trapezist and a mime
a retired colonel
and a reporter
back in the fabulist fifties
according to them, in 1838
a hundred forty-seven frontiersmen
seized the little fortress
out in the desert between
Alamogordo and Las Cruces
and desperately held off
five thousand Mexican regulars
under General Manuel Heroico de Sanchez y Gonzalez
who ten years later became the second president
of the third republic of Mexico
at least partly because of this victory
people have searched
and searched the grounds
either when the Army let them
or when they managed to sneak in and prowl
for any tokens
trinkets
or evidence
of this famous battle
or the fortress
nothing
everything apparently invented
by ten minds soaked in coffee
and possibly absinthe
laboring late into the night
cheered on by each other
two great paintings
compete to show the details
except one of them
my favorite
was inspired by Dali
perhaps, or by Hoch
the semi-barren desert is portrayed
as a clearing in a forest of oaks
where an adobe and stone fortress
towers and topples
above the massed assailants
shiny brass cannon
even the wheels are brass
before and inside the fortress
at my first glance
it all looked quite realistic
like paintings from the Texas revolution
or from the years when Napoleon was winning
the same heroic figures in valiant poses
but dressed in deerskins and coonskins on one side
and dress uniforms with epaulets on the other
but looking closer I discerned
the fortress was built of playing cards
the top one of course the queen of spades
the fortress gates two jokers
the shiny brass cannon toys
like might grace a piano or coffee table
or might be tokens in some battle game
the figures that stand out
are plastic images of soldiers
the frontiersman on the teetering tower
complete with drooping gun barrel
another frontiersman holds a Garand
one of the Mexican soldiers holds a Tommy gun
and all of them stand, kneel, run
on little humps of soil
as plastic as themselves
the general’s cape flows in the wind
despite his rearing horse
gunsmoke clouds float above the cannon
and the army’s rifles
puffs above frontiersmen
thick cumuli pile above the oaks
on the first floor of the fortress
a dozen frontiersman lie dying
attended by a doctor with a pince-nez
who could have stepped off
of a Saturday Evening Post cover
vines grow up or down
the edges of the playing cards
the fortress definitely looks
tacky and old
as if it might have been abandoned
before the heroes seized it
and here we leave them
the courageous defenders posing bravely
the professional soldiers
standing bravely in tall helmets
no question how the battle must resolve
even without the painting’s title
“The Massacre at St. Jovain”
and one wonders, or at least I do
what would drive a team of artists
to paint such detail
to write the complete history of the battle
even reporting the death of the commanding frontiersman
three times at three different places
once astride his horse in the courtyard
and to accompany it with “found” dispatches
from a reporter who died with the defenders
maybe they too had nights disturbed
by policemen keeping order
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