Sullivan Ballou’s white bones felt the sun’s white licking 

for the last time in 1861 when the gray South was rising 

and the northern sea of blue men inhaled lead and gunpowder.

At Manassas, his blood soaked through the thick cotton

and watered the earth like fertilizer―

For dust you are, and to dust you shall return―

like the streams of his native Rhode Island 

releasing its flood waters out into the Atlantic.

His white bones were carried back home in a wooden box 

and shuffled like a maraca death rattle when black workmen 

slumped lower and lower with his eternal weight

as they marched away from the black cannons

towards the slow salt hum of Providence where 

this Ballou body once used oxygen

and an ululating tongue to teach his young sons about manhood 

and that uncertain definition of America.

Many other white bones rattled beneath the bowing 

willow trees to welcome yet another gray fang to the cemetery

as those workmen laid him down and opened a pursed set of

dirt lips for darkness to swallow him whole.

He was dead. Dead, dead, dead, every 

red wing black bird and seagull and heron along the riverside 

made its hackney call to confirm to the universe and to 

all the widows and kids and septuagenarians and stray dogs 

that this body could no longer feel the slow trickle of the river water 

in its toes, could no longer look up through the vast trunks of the forest, 

past the dancing oak leaves, and the branches which thrummed 

eternity’s song, and could no longer feel the tear roll down into

a beard as it beheld the stars twinkling in the milky moon 

glow to wonder if all things were infinite,

to wonder if love could truly be deathless.

His wife, poor Sarah, feeling the presence of Ballou’s ashen, 

pale bones beneath pungent pine boards, inhaled the scent in an 

attempt to poke to the other dark side of death;

to pound back into reality the memories the two had forged in the 

miraculously aimless dance of life. 

She banged away at the coffin lid, 

a drumming, piercing slamming 

so that her pink fists against that pale wood might 

trounce out that lingering sound of his chuckle 

outside her very empty home.

With her swinging fist, she didn’t have to think about his brown eyes no longer watching her, or his rough palms that would no longer grasp around her bare waist.

While she drummed those pine boards, his death was a black, vague idea beyond the rhythm of anger which splintered her fingerbones. 

Then, someone handed her a letter.

A letter that Ballou thought to write, a letter he thought he’d never send. 

His heart still beat, loudly―thump, thump, thump―in the 

coffin-iron ink of the letter. She could not read its anvil words, 

its haunting voice imprinted upon the face of God on the face of this letter. 

She caught one phrase, that was all, 

“Sarah, my love for you is deathless…” 

Deathless, deathless, deathless, 

she heard it in the trickle of the river, 

in the splashing of the rain, in the tears of two fatherless sons. 

It haunted her eternally, bound with mighty 

cables to the millstones of her thoughts.

This immeasurability was that galactic bite 

left out from Sarah’s heart. All the while that letter kissed her breast, 

its aching song of deathlessness humming to the beat of her heart. 

She wept ocean tears, clear crystalline raindrops that filled the earth 

with the emptiness he left behind. She saw death for what it really was:

an absence, a void. A release of air from a body taking up space. 

Space now in the Rhode Island mud six feet beneath her. 

Space to never feed a hungry son or watch him weep as his bride walked slowly to him.

Sarah died too, and so did all the people in this story: dead, dead, dead. 

New red-wing black birds and seagulls and herons confirmed it. 

And new people buried new people, and the river flowed eternally

Into the Atlantic as the infinite clomping of shoes pushed every blade of grass down 

At least once into that cemetery where the birds 

waded through damp marshes, hacking out their confirmations of endings.

New tears fell on new cheeks and new songs were written as new days started and ended―

All white bones take in the sun’s white licking one last time. 

Yet new eyes looked upon his old words: 

“Sarah, my love for you is deathless…” 

and the weeping of men became Ballou’s renown. 

The broken hearts of widows, and children in classrooms, 

and soldiers who have marched into the setting suns of the world, 

and all those who know love and know it might be taken

from them looked upon his letter, where Ballou built a mountain 

of his soul in black ink in 1861, a mountain for all souls 

to climb upon and weep. His love is eternal. It is deathless. 

I weep now as I tell you of it. 

I see now that only his passing, his falling into the jowls of darkness,

make his deathlessness possible―make it eternal. 

For death is the key to remembrance

and remembrance the only elixir of infinity.

Sullivan Ballou’s love is deathless… 

It breathes beyond the dusty battlefield of the past

and lives in my irises as I too weep for 

the ending of all things, as Sarah wept too.

I weep; for through his death I see us all.

Through his ancient tome, I feel the licking 

of the white sun as my white bones 

begin to find the notes that too must one day bring 

the silence and pursed dirt-lips into the blackness below.