by James Dickey
In the early fall, fire-breathing with oak-leaves,
Your patched tunnel-gaze exactly right
For the buried track,
the England-curved water strong
Far-off with your other sight, both fresh-waters marbling together
Supporting not surpassing
What flows what balances
In it. Douglas, power-hang in it all now, for all
The whole thing is worth: catch without warning
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Somewhere in the North Georgia creek like ghost-muscle tensing
Forever, or on the high grass-bed
Yellow of dawn, catch like a man stamp-printed by God-
shock, blue as the very foot
Of fire. Catch into the hunted
Horns of the buck, and thus into the deepest hearing
Nerveless, all bone, bone-tuned
To leaves and twigswith the grass drying wildly
When you woke where you stood with all blades rising
Behind you, and stepped out
possessing the trail,
The racked bramble on either side shining
Like a hornet, your death drawing life
From growth
from flow, as in the gill-cleansing turn
Of the creek
or from the fountain-twist
Of flight, that rounds you
Off, and shies you downwind
Side-faced, all-seeing with hunger,
And over this, steep and straight-up
In the eagle's mile
Let Adam, far from the closed smoke of mills
And blue as the foot
Of every flame, true-up with blind-side outflash
The once-more instantly
Wild world: over Brasstown Bald
Splinter uncontrollably whole.
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Daughter
Hospital, and the fathers' room, where light
Won't look you in the eye. No emergency
But birth. I sit with the friend, and listen
To the unwounded clock. Indirectly glowing, he is grayer,
Unshaven as I. We are both old men
Or nearly. He is innocent. Yet:
What fathers are waiting to be born
But myself, whom the friend watches
With blessed directness? No other man but a worker
With an injured eyeball; his face had been there
When part of an engine flew up.
A tall nurse blotted with ink
And blood goes through. Something written
On her? Blood of my wife? A doctor with a blanket
Comes round a blind corner. "Who gets this little girl?"
I peer into wool: a creature
Somewhat strangely more than red. Dipped in fire.
No one speaks. The friend does not stir; he is innocent
Again: the child is between
Me and the man with one eye. We battle in the air,
Three-eyed, over the new-born. The doctor says,
"All right, now. Which one of you had a breech baby?"
All around I look: look at the possible
Wounded father. He may be losing: he opens his bad eye.
I half-close one of mine, hoping to win
Or help. Breech baby. I don't know. I tell my name.
Taking the doctor by his arms
Around her, the child of fire moves off. I would give one eye for her
Already. If she's not mine I'll steal her.
The doctor comes back. The friend stirs; both our beards
Quicken: the doctor is standing
Over me, saying, "This one's yours."
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It is done: I set my feet
In Heavenly power, and get up. In place of plastic, manned rubber
And wrong light, I say wordlessly
Roll, real God. Roll through us. I shake hands
With the one-eyed man. He has not gained
A child, but may get back his eye; I hope it will return
By summer starlight.
The child almost setting
Its wool on fire, I hold it in the first and last power
It came from: that goes on all the time
There is, shunting the glacier, whirling
Whole forests from their tops, moving
Lava, the flowing stone: moving the hand
Of anyone, ever. Child of fire,
Look up. Look up as I lean and mumble you are part
Of flowing stone: understand: you are part of the wave,
Of the glacier's irrevocable
Millennial inch.
"This is the one," the friend repeats
In his end-of-it daze, his beard gone
Nearly silver, now, with honor, in the all-night night
Of early morning. Godfather, I say
To him: not father of God, but assistant
Father to this one. All forests are moving, all waves,
All lava and ice. I lean. I touch
One finger. Real God, roll.
Roll.
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The Olympian
Los Angeles back-yarding in its blue-eyed waters
Of empty swim, by my tract-house of packaged hard-candy
I lay in wait with the sun
And celebrity beer
for the Olympian,
Now my oldest boy's junior
High school algebra teacher, who had brought back the black-magic gold
Of the East, down the fast lane,
Freewaying, superhuman with rubberized home-stretch,
The four hundred meters from Tokyo
To Balboa Boulevard, leaving in his wake
All over the earth, the Others, the nation-motley doom-striped ones,
Those heart-eating sprinters, those Losers.
With Olympia Beer I was warming
Warming up with the best chill waters
Of the West Coast, cascading never-ending
Down out of Washington State. Now is your moment of truth
With me at last, O Champion! for I had laid a course as strange
To him as to me. Steeplechase! I had always leapt into water
Feet first, and could get out
Faster than in. I was ready for the Big One:
For the Water Jump in the corner
Of the lax, purfled pool, under the cemented palm
Where at night the shrewd rat climbed
And rustled and ruled the brown fronds over the underlit
Blue oval, surveying Sepulveda,
And in its color and kind, suffered
World recognition.
With a slide-rule in his shirt-pocket,
His bullet-proof glasses drawing
Into pointscompetitive pointsand fish-eye-lensing,
Crossflashing on my hogged, haggard grassplot
Of slapped-down, laid-back Sepulveda, just after he'd Won It All,
He came lankily, finely drawn
Onto my turf, where all the time I had been laying
For him, building my energy-starches,
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My hilarious, pizza-fed fury. My career of fat
Lay in the speed-trap, in the buckets and tools of the game-plan,
The snarls of purified rope. Then dawned the strict gods of Sparta,
The free gods of Athens! O lungs of Pheidippides collapsing in a square
Of the delivered city! O hot, just-hurdlable gates
Of deck-chairs! Lounges! A measured universe
Of exhilarating laws! Here I had come there I'd gone
Laying it down confusing, staggering
The fast lane and the slow, on and over
And over recliners, sun-cots, cleaning-poles and beach-balls,
Foiled cans of rusty rat-poison bowing, split casks
Of diatomaceous earth corks spaced-out like California
On blue-and-white dacron cords lost-and-found swim-fins
Unma
tched and pigeon-toed half-hearted air
In blazing rings doughnuts and play rafts dragons and elephants
Blown-up by mouth, now sighing most of life
Away the lawful No-Running signs
Turned to the wall. And all the time, all the time,
Under the brown-browed, rose-ash glower
Of the smog-bank, the crows, long gone
Gray with the risen freeways, were thronging and hawing
To be Doves of Peace to be turned
Loose, displaying and escaping, over the jolted crowds
Of Unimart, the rammed Victory Stand,
and in the rose-ash
Of early dusk, we called our wives, gray as crows
In their golf-hats, to the secret Olympics, laid down in my laws
Within laws, where world champions, now mad with the moon
Of moonlighting, sold running shoes. This so, we insisted
On commercials, those all-comers'
Career-dreams of athletes: "We are brought to you by the Bringers of the Flame,
The double-dry double martini," those women said. "Get set!
Get set! You're being born
Again, in spite of everything!" James Bond and my smallest boy
Blazed with one cap-pistol together. We hove like whales from the line.
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Twice around
We were going for, cursing and cruising like ghosts, over dog-food bowls,
Over sprinklers passed-out from their spin-off
Of rainbows and I was losing
But not badly, and even gained a little, coming out
Of the water-jump and over the jump-rope, and out of him or maybe
Me surely me burst a mindless deep
Belching blindsiding laugh down the backstretch
Of earth-kegs and dirty cleansing-tools that skinned the dust
From the under-blue, and for one unsettling moment left it
Blazing and mattering. I blazed I felt great I was a great
Plaster stadium-god lagging lolloping hanging
In there with the best: was running pale and heavy
With cement-dust from two wives running
Then coming around coming back
Down the slow lane lurching lorry-swaying:
Now toward two wives making up for making
The gelatin-murmur of crowds, I pounded, wet and laboring,
And then, half a pool
Behind, went into the bell-lap.
I was holding my own
Back there, as we rounded
Past the stands he a long first and I
A world-class second and counting
On my finish or something Yes! My finish to come
From the home turf like an ascension all-seeing
World-recognized poison-proof smoke-proof time-proof
Out of the pool, a rat's climb grappling
Half-a-lap half-a-lap still alive
In mid-stride, louring, lumbering, crow-hopping
Behind the athlete's unhurried
Slack, unearthly footling lope:
I stepped low and heavy
Over the last light rope, smashed water with my sole
Flat climbed, lurched, legged it and duck-footed
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For home a good not shameful
Second this was all right and everything
But no! My weave my plan the run
Of my knots had caught up with him caught
Him where he lived
in his feet
and he was down
In styrofoam, and on a bloated blessèd doughnut-ring
Of rubber rolled: the finish-line leapt exploded
Into Reality, shot-through with deathless flame, crossed with white paper:
Swam illicitly, aboundingly
Like wind-aided glory. With courage to do credit
To any rat, I cornered and turned
It on. He came back instantly, but instantly was not soon
Enough, for I charged past like a slow freight
All over the earth, and had got it
And gone long gone and burst
Through the living tissue: breasted and blanked
The Tape and can feel it
Bannering, still, on my chest
Like wing-span, that once was toilet-paper, torn epically
Where the true Olympian slurred
His foot and fell, and I felt my lungs collapsing in a square
Of the City, like Pheidippides dying of the sheer
Good of my news.
Far off, still rising at rose dusk
And night, free under the low-browed smoke, and grayer
Than any fake peace-bird,
Like a called crow I answer
Myself utterly, with a whole laugh that body-language one-world
One word of joy straight into the ruining tons
Of smoke that trash my head and doom it
And keep it recognized
in the age
And condition of my kind, and hear also, maybe not entirely
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From myself, the Olympian's laugh
Coming from somewhere
Behind, blindsidedly, getting the point
At last, sighing like ghosts and like rubber, for fat
And luck, all over the earth, where that day and any and every
Day after it, devil hindmost and Goddamn it
To glory, I lumbered for gold.
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THe Little More
JBTD
I
But the little more: the little more
This boy will be, is hard
For me to talk of
But harder for him. Manhood is only a little more,
A little more time, a little more everything than he
Has on him now. He would know, if he could go forward
From where he puts down his ball,
His top, his willow spear,
that he will face into the air
Where the others his age will be breaking, or be
About to break,
and he will watch them grow pale
With the warnings of doctors,
And all their balloons, and parents and the other
Dead will be floating
Away from them, over the mountains.
I would tell him
This * is where the quiet
Valley comes in, and the red creek
Where he will row with no other,
The water around each blade
Explosive, ablaze with his only initials,
Joy set in the bending void
Between the oars
and swung,
As the last balloon disappears, needing
Color no more. Yes! This is when the far mountain
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Will come to him, under his feet
Of its own wish
when he steps up
From water, and in the wind he will start
To hear the enormous resonance
Children cannot make out: of his own gigantic
Continuous stride over all ferocious rocks
That can be known.
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II
From the ones who have grown all they can
Come and stop softly, boy,
On the strong side of the road
That the other side does not see. Then move.
Put your feet where you look,
and not
Where you look, and none of your tracks
Will pass off, but wander, and for you
Be fresh places, free and aggressive.
Boy who will always be glanced-at
and then fixed
In warm gazes, already the past knows
It cannot invent you again,
For the glitter on top of the current
Is not the current.
No, but what dances on it is
More beautiful than wh
at takes its time
Beneath, running on a single unreleased
Eternal breath, rammed
With carry, its all-out dream and dread
Surging bull-breasted,
Head-down, unblocked.
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For a Time and Place
A South Carolina inauguration of Richard Riley as governor
May we be able to begin with ourselves
Underfoot and rising,
Peering through leaves we have basketed, through tendrils hanging
Like bait, through flowers,
Through lifted grave-soil: peering
Past the short tree that stands
In place for us, sawed-off, unbendable: a thing
Pile-driven down
And flowering from the impactsuch weaving
Consuming delicacy in the leaves, out of such
Up-wedged and pineappled bark! We look alive
Through those petals in the censer-swung pots: through
That swinging soil, and the split leaves fountaining out
Of the mauled tree, to the east horizon vibrant
With whole-earth hold-down, past a single sail pillowing