The City's Oldest Known Survivor of the Great War

By James Doyle James Doyle

marches in uniform down the traffic stripe

at the center of the street, counts time

to the unseen web that has rearranged

the air around him, his left hand

stiff as a leather strap along his side,

the other saluting right through the decades

as if they weren't there, as if everyone under ninety

were pervasive fog the morning would dispel

in its own good time, as if the high school band

all flapping thighs and cuffs behind him

were as ghostly as the tumbleweed on every road

dead-ended in the present, all the ancient infantry

shoulder right, through a skein of bone, presenting arms

across the drift, nothing but empty graves now

to round off another century,

the sweet honey of the old cadence, the streets

going by at attention, the banners glistening with dew,

the wives and children blowing kisses.

Poem copyright © 2004 by James Doyle and reprinted from the New Orleans Review, Vol. 30, No.2, by permission of the author. His latest book is Einstein Considers a Sand Dune, Steel Toe Books, 2004.

Biography

Doyle was born in New York City and grew up in the Bronx. He is the author of Einstein Considers a Sand Dune (2004), winner of the 2003 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, and Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes (2007). Doyle worked in Wisconsin politics and taught before retiring; he lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with this wife, poet Sharon Doyle.

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