A Trooper of Forrest

Time is a puny thing when shadows and lights
Of a man's counting stretch into ninety years.
Evenings he strokes his beard and looks off yonder
The near valleys are dark, without memory.
In them time is stout, with a rattlesnake's measured
Hitch and swell and scaly outreach again.
I leave the snake to his slow business
The snake is yours, my children of dark valleys.
Beyond the fangs of shadow and of time,
Clearer than your faces, come on my mind the hills,
The good riders loping the wilderness road.
I know sunlight on a horse's mane, I hear
The good talk, the saddles creaking, the smoke
Of camp-fires at the river's bend and the mounting
Hoofbeats. The taste of powder in my mouth
And with it a song -
"Good riders, good riders, good riders, we air
A-courtin' your daughter so bright and so fair
Kin we git lodgin' here, O here?
Kin we git lodgin' here?"
And no songs like that, my son, my boy
No such song comes out of the dark valley
Out of which you move, a lean young stranger
Swimming up from darkness to my bench
To find me drowsing here in the late sun
With a late honeysuckle vine and an autumn bee
Sole company
And what is the trouble now?
Something to tousel a shock of hair and knit
the open muscles at your sunburnt throat. The captain
Out of game? An ankle battered? A knee
Chipped in practice? And still the game to play?
And the headlines speaking disaster to the soft
And groaning world, which finds so much each day
To pester it. That is a woman's talk.
And this is a woman's age to take it so hard.
I have known harder days than this and men
Fit to muscle out their heft of trouble
We never waited for trouble then. Our rule -
Old Bedford Forrest's rule was, 'Give 'em a dare!'
If you can't ride to meet your trouble
Then walk. And if you can't walk, crawl.
But face it, hound it, swap licks with it.
You have heard of General Jackson, how he took
Dickinson's bullet, and faced him down. And Houston
Yanking the arrow from his thigh at To-ho-pe-ka
They were good men, and Forrest took after them
And his mother who whipped her 18 year old son
For being too smart and sent him to the mill
He came home in his slick Confederate duds
And thought himself too good to help his mother.
Not Bedford - That was Joseph - there were eight
Brothers in the Confederate war, eight Forrests
And all 'tarnation fighters and hard riders.
And Bedford oldest, hawkeyed, chain-lighting quick
Talk about Marshal ney, Napoleon, Caesar
Or Alexander at Arbela - I've not heard tell
Of a general commanding troops of the line
Who killed his thirty men in personal combat
As Forrest did - he shot them, hacked them, ripped them
Knocked them out of his way. He minded bullets
No more than boys at One-eyed cat mind balls
And met his fill of them from start to finish
And when Lieutenant Gould, who lost the guns
At day's gap, went crazy with shame and anger
And under reprimand whipped out his gun and shot
His own General, then Forrest gripped
The deadly pistol hand, and with his teeth
Opened a knife and stabbed the proud young fool
And Gould died begging forgiveness
Which Forrest gave
For though he could whip us all -
Would whip us if we needed it, we knew
Old Bedford for a tender man. We have seen him
Weep for a perished friend. He loved good soldiers
And he hated bad ones, General Bragg, included -
And had words to tell them just how bad they were.

-Donald Davidson