Next: For Sound of Music Fans Up: Cool Stuff Previous: Some Favorite Recipes
Next: For Sound of
Music Fans Up: Cool Stuff
Previous: Some Favorite
Recipes
Do I have permission from the publisher to post these poems? Yes, actually I do. Thanks for asking.
Read also about my other favorite poet, Donald Hall. Go out and buy his masterpiece, the book-length poem "The One Day."
Often, in these blue meadows,
I hear what passes for the bark of seals
And on August week ends the cold of a personal ice age
Comes up through my bare feet
Which are trying to walk like a boy's again
So that nothing on earth can have changed
On the ground where I was raised.
The dark grass here is like
The pads of mukluks going on and on
Because I once burned kerosene to read
Myself near the North Pole
In the journal of Arctic explorers
Found, years after death, preserved
In a tent, part of whose canvas they had eaten
Before the last entry.
All over my father's land
The seal holes sigh like an organ,
And one entry carries more terror
Than the blank page that signified death
In 1912, on the icecap.
It says that, under the ice,
The killer whale darts and distorts,
Cut down by the flawing glass
To a weasel's shadow,
And when, through his ceiling, he sees
Anything darker than snow
He falls away
To gather more and more force
From the iron depths of cold water,
His shadow dwindling
Almost to nothing at all, then charges
Straight up, looms up at the ice and smashes
Into it with his forehead
To splinter the roof, to isolate seal or man
On a drifting piece of the floe
Which he can overturn.
If you run, he will follow you
Under the frozen pane,
Turning as you do, zigzagging,
And at the most uncertain of your ground
Will shatter through, and lean,
And breathe frankly in your face
An enormous breath smelling of fish.
With the lungs staining your air
You know the unsaid recognition
Of which the explorers died:
They had been given an image
Of how the downed dead pursue us.
They knew, as they starved to death,
That not only in the snow
But in the family field
The small shadow moves,
And under the bare feet in the summer:
That somewhere the turf will heave,
And the outraged breath of the dead,
So long held, will form
Unbreathably around the living.
The cows low oddly here
As I pass, a small bidden shape
Going with me, trembling like foxfire
Under my heels and their hooves.
I shall write this by kerosene,
Pitch a tent in the pasture, and starve.
There's been so much interest in James Dickey since his death, I thought I'd add another one of my favorites:
Bums, on waking,
Do not always find themselves
In gutters with water running over their legs
And the pillow of the curbstone
Turning hard as sleep drains from it.
Mostly, they do not know
But hope for where they shall come to.
The opening of the eye is precious,
And the shape of the body also,
Lying as it has fallen,
Disdainfully crumpling earthward
Out of alcohol.
Drunken under their eyelids
Like children sleeping toward Christmas,
They wait for the light to shine
Wherever it may decide.
Often it brings them staring
Through glass in the rich part of town,
Where the forms of humanized wax
Are arrested in midstride
With their heads turned, and dressed
By force. This is ordinary, and has come
To be disappointing.
They expect and hope for
Something totally other:
That while they staggered last night
For hours, they got clear,
Somehow, of the city; that they
Burst through a hedge, and are lying
In a trampled rose garden,
Pillowed on a bulldog's side,
A watchdog's, whose breathing
Is like the earth's, unforced --
Or that they may, once a year
(Any dawn now), awaken
In church, not on the coffin boards
Of a back pew, or on furnace-room rags,
But on the steps of the altar
Where candles are opening their eyes
With all-seeing light
And the green stained-glass of the windows
Falls on them like sanctified leaves.
Who else has quite the same
Commitment to not being sure
What he shall behold, come from sleep --
A child, a policeman, an effigy?
Who else has died and thus risen?
Never knowing how they have got there,
They might just as well have walked
On water, through walls, out of graves,
Through potter's fields and through barns,
Through slums where their stony pillows
Refused to harden, because of
Their hope for this morning's first light,
With water moving over their legs
More like living cover than it is.
Here's yet another Dickey poem about sharks.
