Missing | 21 February 2013

What are so noticeably lacking
in Mathew Brady’s interviews
with the dead are the smells;

likewise in Ambrose Bierce’s corpses
their faces gnawed away by hogs
near the Greenbrier, Cheat, Gauley;

or the wounded roasted in gullies
a foot deep in leaves
at Shiloh, Spotsylvania;

and you, reader, cannot supply
what is left out.  So how much more
eludes us? . . . the scent in the rain.