The Eagle's Mile
* * *
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