Improv 2, Week 8

Elegy For the Native Guards
Natasha Trethewey

We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead
trailing the boat-streamers, noisy fanfare-
all the way to Ship Island. What we see
first is the fort, its roof of grass, a lee-
half reminder of the men who served there-
a weathered monument to some of the dead.

Inside we follow the ranger, hurried
though we are to get to the beach. He tells
of graves lost in the Gulf, the island split
in half when Hurricane Camille hit,
shows us casemates, cannons, the store that sells
souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.

The Daughters of the Confederacy
has placed a plaque here, at the fort's entrance-
each Confederate soldier's name raised hard
in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards-
2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx.
What is monument to their legacy?

All the grave markers, all the crude headstones-
water-lost. Now fish dart among their bones,
and we listen for what the waves intone.
Only the fort remains, near forty feet high,
round, unfinished, half open to the sky,
the elements-wind, rain-God's deliberate eye.

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The boys left the fountain around dusk, I watched
as they mulled away from the town square, down
the hill to where the sidewalk met the creek,
and crumbled into the sand and glass of the water’s
edge. The fountain churned up bubbles like an overloaded

washing machine, the Indian in the center was dressed
in layers of of black and gold crate paper: school colors
of the Blackriver Pirates. From the window of the pizzaria
I noticed the Indian was more then cemented to the water,
but to monumuent that he didn’t realize was himself.

Robins fluttered the paper, one perched atop the headdress
while the storefronts dimmed causing a smolder
of tangled light on the bubbles that cascaded over the lip
of stone circling the base. Last week, we learned in school
that Iroquois means People of the Longhouse. In the winter

they made fishing holes in the ice, sometimes catching nothing
for weeks. Boys in the tribe were made to dive into the water
if they can’t produce fish for their families: for those who waited
in the longhouse. I wonder if the Indian welcomes those boys
with their soap. Does he tell them, when they are all alone,
they must dive into the creek where the sidewalk crumbles,
to clean off after the hunt, that everything water touches is legacy.