We could hear the parade three blocks before
it arrived at our corner, a Sousa march
that sounded like distance, distance, distance,
with an occasional boom wadded up in a ball
of steel wool, and then we’d see two soldiers
coming, marching in step, holding high a white,
gold-bordered banner, like the inside
of a lid to a box of cigars, with something
scrolly printed on it. Behind them came
the trombones and tubas, bobbing in waves
like light on choppy water, then more parade,
some of it stomping on naked legs in boots
with flippy tassels. But for me, it is always
the vets of the Spanish-American War
whom I remember best, the last three or four
still alive, in waxed convertibles, phlegmy
old men in ancient uniforms borne forward
into the light of the future, spectacles glinting,
on their way to the Grave of the Unknown
Soldier, where they would each year hear
or partly hear through ears grown big,
and soft as wallets, a struggling “Taps”
soon followed by the pops of five old rifles
with the sixth pop always an instant late,
the punctuation at the end of what we’d all,
all spring, been sometimes looking forward to.