James Dickey by James Dickey

Author:James Dickey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780819571557
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

And dried to one drop

Of fox blood I nail-polished in,

That lopsided animal sun

Over the nearly buried

Or rising human half-moon,

My glassed skin halfmooning wrongly.

Between them, the logging road, the stopped

Stream, the disappearance into

The one bush’s common, foreseen

Superhuman door:

All this where I nailed it,

With my wife’s nailbrush, on my finger,

To keep, not under, but over

My thumb, a hammering day-and-night sign

Of that country.

THE FIEND

He has only to pass by a tree moodily walking head down

A worried accountant not with it and he is swarming

He is gliding up the underside light of leaves unfloating

In a seersucker suit passing window after window of her building.

He finds her at last, chewing gum talking on the telephone.

The wind sways him softly comfortably sighing she must bathe

Or sleep. She gets up, and he follows her along the branch

Into another room. She stands there for a moment and the teddy bear

On the bed feels its guts spin as she takes it by the leg and tosses

It off. She touches one button at her throat, and rigor mortis

Slithers into his pockets, making everything there—keys, pen

and secret love—stand up. He brings from those depths the knife

And flicks it open it glints on the moon one time carries

Through the dead walls making a wormy static on the TV screen.

He parts the swarm of gnats that live excitedly at this perilous level

Parts the rarefied light high windows give out into inhabited trees

Opens his lower body to the moon. This night the apartments are sinking

To ground level burying their sleepers in the soil burying all floors

But the one where a sullen shopgirl gets ready to take a shower,

Her hair in rigid curlers, and the rest. When she gives up

Her aqua terry-cloth robe the wind quits in mid-tree the birds

Freeze to their perches round his head a purely human light

Comes out of a one-man oak around her an energy field she stands

Rooted not turning to anything else then begins to move like a saint

Her stressed nipples rising like things about to crawl off her as he gets

A hold on himself. With that clasp she changes senses something

Some breath through the fragile walls some all-seeing eye

Of God some touch that enfolds her body some hand come up out of roots

That carries her as she moves swaying at this rare height. She wraps

The curtain around her and streams. The room fades. Then coming

Forth magnificently the window blurred from within she moves in a cloud

Chamber the tree in the oak currents sailing in a clear air keeping pace

With her white breathless closet—he sees her mistily part her lips

As if singing to him, come up from river-fog almost hears her as if

She sang alone in a cloud its warmed light streaming into his branches

Out through the gauze glass of the window. She takes off her bathing cap.

The tree with him ascending himself and the birds all moving

In darkness together crumbling the bark in their claws.

By this time he holds in his awkward, subtle limbs the limbs

Of a hundred understanding trees. He has learned what a plant is like

When it

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