Poems, 1957-1967 by James Dickey

Author:James Dickey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780819569820
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

GOODBYE TO SERPENTS

Through rain falling on us no faster

Than it runs down the wall we go through,

My son and I shed Paris like a skin

And slip into a cage to say goodbye.

Through a hole in the wall

Of the Jardin des Plantes

We come to go round

The animals for the last time;

Tomorrow we set out for home.

For some reason it is the snakes

To which we seem to owe

The longest farewell of our lives.

These have no bars, but drift

On an island held still by a moat,

Unobstructedly gazing out.

My son will not move from watching

Them through the dust of cold water,

And neither will I, when I realize

That this is my farewell

To Europe also. I begin to look

More intently than I ever have.

In the moat one is easily swimming

Like the essence of swimming itself,

Pure line and confident curve

Requiring no arms or legs.

In a tree, a bush, there is one

Whose body is living there motionless,

Emotionless, with drops running down,

His slack tail holding a small

Growing gem that will not fall.

I can see one’s eyes in the brush,

As fixed as a portrait’s,

Gazing into, discovering, forgetting

The heart of all rainfall and sorrow.

He licks at the air,

Tasting the carded water

Changed by the leaves of his home.

The rain stops in midair before him

Mesmerized as a bird—

A harmony of drops in which I see

Towers and churches, domes,

Capitals, streets like the shining

Paths of the Jardin des Plantes,

All old, all cold with my gaze

In glittering, unearthly fascination.

I say, “Yes! So I have seen them!

But I have brought also the human,

The presence of self and of love.”

Yet it is not so. My son shifts

Uneasily back and away, bored now,

A tourist to the bitter end,

And I know I have not been moved

Enough by the things I have moved through,

And I have seen what I have seen

Unchanged, hypnotized, and perceptive:

The jewelled branches,

The chandeliers, the windows

Made for looking through only when weeping,

The continent hazy with grief,

The water in the air without support

Sustained in the serpent’s eye.

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