Ghost River Song

Turn now to rest:
in the west
where the light is failing,
sounds the retreat,
the defeat
of the day.
[And the] smoke from the camps,
in the damp air like streamers trailing —
homeward to the night, look away.

Bent on your task,
now you ask
what I saw of Shiloh,
Stone’s River, Resaca,
Chickamauga…
Sir, for that I’ve been slurred
as a mad pornographer,
and I never told the half of what I saw.

River roll, roll on down,
roll on past this sleepy town —
no one left around who ever comes here anyway.
Ghost River Song,
I have known you all along:
always near, always here, always gone.

But now that war’s
just a tour
for an old campaigner,
now just a chore
for a tagalong scribe,
we’ll indulge one tale more —
how I first came to this shore,
to watch as scores of enemy died.

Spied from this ledge
as they fled
from the burning forest,
cripples that pawed
stump and claw through the mud;
watched ’em crawl to these banks
over bodies that stank
and sank
and drank
from water poisoned with blood.

River roll, roll on down,
roll on past this sleepy town —
no one left around who still remembers anyway.
Ghost River Song,
I have known you all along:
always near, always here, always gone.

[Instrumental]

Long dead, those days
when I wandered these purple valleys,
gorgeous, ineffable, teeming with death;
and at midnight watch heard
but the zealot mockingbird,
sweet treachery
in every warbled breath.

Strange how those days,
with their mournful and blood-stained phantoms,
should draw from me such a tender farewell;
strange, but the truth
is a man who’s spent his youth
in hell
with age will with look back fondly on hell.

River, roll, roll on down,
roll on past this tired town,
like you I don’t expect I’ll ever pass this way again;
every dog has his day,
every man has his say,
but time has its way in the end.

River roll, roll on down,
roll on past this sleepy town,
no one left around who still remembers anyway.
Ghost River Song,
I have known you all along:
always near, always here, always gone.