The Exhibit

[TranquillityBase]

For reasons unknown, Gardner aimed
his camera only at the bodies of the enemy,
Confederate artillery men piled
like bags of grain about a caisson
in front of a pockmarked whitewashed church,
scattered Louisianans along a fence row,
North Carolinians heaped together in a sunken road
or an anonymous young soldier "found on a hillside"
alone in the disordered pose of a final moment,
all awaiting shallow mass graves.

Gibson developed the plates
inside a stifling tent, his hands black
with silver nitrate, battling the flies
drawn to the collodion, amid the stench
of hundreds of corpses, human and animal.

Two weeks after the slaughter
The Dead of Antietam opened 
in Matthew Brady’s gallery on Broadway.
Crowds of people go up the stairs,
bend over stereographic viewers:
“Hushed reverent groups standing
around these weird copies of carnage
chained by the strange spell
that dwells in dead men’s eyes.”

Stereo views: 50 cents.  Cartes de visite: 25 cents.

It was the first and last exhibit of the killed.
Bloodier battles were to come,
but there was no Dead of Chancellorsville, 
of Gettysburg, of Chickamauga.
The appetite for the photographic reality of war
was sated by the Confederate dead left behind
along Hagerstown Pike in 1862.

In October 1862

less than a month after the slaughter

the Dead of Antietam opened on Broadway.

Confederate artillery men piled

like bags of grain about a caisson

in front of a pockmarked Dunker church,

scattered bodies along a fence row,

or heaped together in a worn rutted road

or even alone in the disordered pose

of a final moment, all awaiting shallow mass graves,

the nameless enemy forever unburied

prisoners of death locked inside a frame

in a lush gallery with velvet couches

and lit by chandeliers

where living bodies wander and gaze

seeing for the first time displayed

like a painter’s canvases

the aftermath of war’s artistry.