The Eagle's Mile Read online

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  title : The Eagle's Mile Wesleyan Poetry

  author : Dickey, James.

  publisher : Wesleyan University Press

  isbn10 | asin : 0819511870

  print isbn13 : 9780819511874

  ebook isbn13 : 9780585371481

  language : English

  subject American poetry.

  publication date : 1990

  lcc : PS3554.I32E34 1990eb

  ddc : 811/.54

  subject : American poetry.

  Page i

  The Eagle's Mile

  Page ii

  Other books by James Dickey

  Poetry

  Into the Stone

  Drowning with Others

  Helmets

  Two Poems of the Air

  Buckdancer's Choice

  Poems 19571967

  The Eye-beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy

  The Zodiac

  The Strength of Fields

  Head-Deep in Strange Sounds

  The Early Motion

  Värmland

  Falling, May Day Sermon, and Other Poems

  False Youth

  Puella

  The Central Motion: Poems 19681979

  Prose

  Jericho: The South Beheld

  God's Images

  Wayfarer

  Fiction

  Deliverance

  Alnilam

  Children's Poetry

  Tucky the Hunter

  Bronwen, the Traw and the Shape-Shifter

  Criticism

  Sorties

  The Suspect in Poetry

  Babel to Byzantium

  Belles Lettres

  Self-Interviews

  Night Hurdling

  Voiced Connections

  Page iii

  The Eagle's Mile

  James Dickey

  Page iv

  The University Press of New England is a consortium of universities in New England dedicated to publishing scholarly and trade works by authors from member campuses and elsewhere. The New England imprint signifies uniform standards for publication excellence maintained without exception by the consortium members. A joint imprint of the University Press of New England and a sponsoring member acknowledges the publishing mission of that university and its support for the dissemination of scholarship throughout the world. Cited by the American Council of Learned Societies as a model to be followed, University Press of New England publishes books under its own imprint and the imprints of Brandeis University, Brown University, Clark University, University of Connecticut, Dartmouth College, University of New Hampshire, University of Rhode Island, Tufts University, University of Vermont, and Wesleyan University.

  Copyright © 1990 by James Dickey

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotation in critical articles or reviews, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For further information contact University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755.

  Some of these poems appeared previously in the following publications: The Amicus Journal, Charleston Magazine, False Youth (Pressworks Publishing, Inc.), Harpers, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Head-Deep in Strange Sounds: Free Flight Improvisations from the Unenglish (Palaemon Press, Ltd.), Kenyon Review, Night Hurdling (Bruccoli Clark, Inc.), Paris Review, Proceedings, Southern Magazine, Southport, Värmland (Palaemon Press, Ltd.), and Verse. "Gila Bend," "The Little More," and "The Six" first appeared in Poetry; "Basics: (I) Level, (II) Simplex," ''Craters," "Eagles," "Expanses," "Farmers," "Moon Flock," "Night Bird," "Sleepers," "Snow Thickets," "Sea," "The One," "The Three," and "Weeds" first appeared in The American Poetry Review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ¥

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dickey, James.

  The eagle's mile / James Dickey.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-8195-2185-x (alk. paper)

  ISBN 0-8195-1187-0 (alk. paper : pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS3554.132E34 1990

  811'.54dc20 89-49257

  CIP

  Wesleyan Poetry

  5 4 3 2 1

  Page v

  To Deborah, my wife,

  and to Chris, Kevin, Bronwen, James IV and Katie

  . . . those of the blood, and the heart's-blood

  Page vii

  CONTENTS

  Eagles

  3

  Gila Bend

  5

  Circuit

  6

  Night Bird

  7

  Daybreak

  8

  Two Women

  9

  Immortals

  Earth

  11

  Air

  12

  Sea

  13

  To the Butterflies

  14

  The One

  17

  The Three

  18

  The Six

  20

  Weeds

  22

  Spring-Shock

  23

  The Eagle's Mile

  25

  Daughter

  28

  The Olympian

  30

  The Little More

  35

  For a Time and Place

  38

  Vessels

  40

  Sleepers

  41

  Meadow Bridge

  42

  Tomb Stone

  43

  To Be Done in Winter

  44

  Moon Flock

  45

  Snow Thickets

  47

  Expanses

  48

  Page viii

  Double-tongue:

  Collaborations and Rewrites

  Lakes of Värmland

  51

  Form

  52

  Heads

  54

  Farmers

  56

  Craters

  58

  Attempted Departure

  60

  Poem

  61

  Purgation

  63

  Basics

  Level

  64

  Simplex

  65

  Word

  66

  Page 3

  Eagles

  If I told you I used to know the circular truth

  Of the void,

  that I have been all over it building

  My height

  receiving overlook

  And that my feathers were not

  Of feather-make, but broke from a desire to drink

  The rain before it falls

  or as it is falling:

  If I were to tell you that the rise of any free bird

  Is better

  the larger the bird is,

  And that I found myself one of these

  Without surprise, you would understand

  That this makes of air a thing that would be liberty

  Enough for any world but this one,

  And could see how I should have gone

  Up and out of all

  all * of it

  On feathers glinting

  Multitudinously as rain, as silica-sparks around

  One form with wings, as it is hammered loose

  From rock, at dead

  Of classic light: that is, at dead

  Of light.

  Page 4

  Believe, too,

  While you're at it, that the flight of eagles has

 
; For use, long muscles steeped only

  In escape,

  and moves through

  Clouds that will open to nothing

  But it *, where the bird leaves behind

  All sympathy: leaves

  The man who, for twenty lines

  Of a new poem, thought he would not be shut

  From those wings: believed

  He could be going. I speak to you from where

  I was shook off: I say again, shook

  Like thís, the words I had

  When I could not spread:

  When thát bird rose

  Without my shoulders: Leave my unstretched weight,

  My sympathy grovelling

  In weeds and nothing, and go

  up from the human down-

  beat in my hand. Go up without anything

  Of me in your wings, but remember me in your feet

  As you fold them. The higher rock is*

  The more it lives. Where you take hold, Í will take

  Thát stand in my mind, rock bird alive with the spirit-

  life of height,

  on my down-thousands

  Of fathoms, classic

  Claw-stone, everything under.

  Page 5

  Gila Bend

  Where aerial gunnery was, you think at first a cadaver

  On foot might get through

  Forty years after. Shots of space pelter back

  Off the dead bullets; walking, you should brand, brand

  The ground but you don't: you leave

  Not a thing moving on a sand mountain

  Smashed flat by something that didn't know

  What else to do.

  This silver small-stone heat

  No man can cross; no man could get

  To his feet, even to rise face-out

  Full-force from the grave, where the sun is down on hím

  Alone, harder than resurrection

  Is úp: down harder

  harder

  Much harder than that.

  Page 6

  Circuit

  Beaches; it is true: they go on on *

  And on, but as they ram and pack, foreseeing

  Around a curve, always slow-going headlong

  For the circle

  swerving from water

  But not really, their minds on a perfect connection, no matter

  How long it takes. You can't be

  On them without making the choice

  To meet yourself no matter

  How long. Don't be afraid;

  It will come will hit you

  Straight out of the wind, on wings or not,

  Where you have blanked yourself

  Still with your feet. It may be raining

  In twilight, a sensitive stripping

  Of arrow-feathers, a lost trajectory struck

  Stock-stilling through them,

  or where you cannot tell

  If the earth is green or red,

  Basically, or if the rock with your feet on it

  Has floated over the water. As for where you are standing

  Nów, there are none of those things; there are only

  In one shallow spray-pool thís one

  Strong horses circling. Stretch and tell me, Lord;

  Let the place talk.

  This may just be it.

  Page 7

  Night Bird

  Some beating in there

  That has bunched, and backed

  Up in it out of moonlight, and now

  Is somewhere around. You are sure that like a curving grave

  It must be able to fall

  and rise

  and fall and that's

  Right, and rise

  on your left hand

  or other

  Or behind your back on one hand

  You don't have and suddenly there is no limit

  To what a man can get out of

  His failure to see:

  this gleam

  Of air down the nape of the neck, and in it everything

  There is of flight

  and nothing else,

  and it is

  All right and all over you

  From around

  as you are carried

  In yourself and there is no way

  To nothing-but-walk

  No way and a bidden flurry

  And a half-you of air.

  Page 8

  Daybreak

  You sit here on solid sand banks trying to figure

  What the difference is when you see

  The sun and at the same time see the ocean

  Has no choice: none, but to advance more or less

  As it does:

  waves

  Which were, a moment ago, actual

  Bodiless sounds that could have been airborne,

  Now bring you nothing but face-off

  After face-off, with only gravitational sprawls

  Laid in amongst them. To those crests

  Dying hard, you have nothing to say:

  you cannot help it

  If you emerge; it is not your fault. You show: you stare

  Into the cancelling gullies, saved only by dreaming a future

  Of walking forward, in which you can always go flat

  Flat down where the shallows have fallen

  Clear: where water is shucked of all wave-law:

  Lies running: runs

  In skylight, gradually cleaning, and you gaze straight into

  The whole trembling forehead of yourself

  Under you, and at your feet find your body