September 13: Poet of the Week, James Dickey, "The Sheep Child"

Last night, I was too tired to choose.  Tonight, however, I have selected James Dickey as the Poet of the Week.

Dickey does not write about beautiful subjects sometimes.  His poems are always a little . . . off.  That's why I love him.  He doesn't mind if he makes his readers uncomfortable.  In fact, I would say that Dickey went out of his way to make his readers squirm.

So, Constant Reader, you will be made to feel a tad strange this week when you read this blog.

Don't blame Saint Marty.  Blame James Dickey.  And enjoy it.

The Sheep Child

by:  James Dickey

Farm boys wild to couple

With anything      with soft-wooded trees   

With mounds of earth      mounds   

Of pinestraw      will keep themselves off   

Animals by legends of their own:   

In the hay-tunnel dark

And dung of barns, they will   

Say    I have heard tell

That in a museum in Atlanta   

Way back in a corner somewhere   

There’s this thing that’s only half   

Sheep      like a woolly baby

Pickled in alcohol      because   

Those things can’t live.      his eyes

Are open      but you can’t stand to look   

I heard from somebody who ...

But this is now almost all   

Gone. The boys have taken   

Their own true wives in the city,

The sheep are safe in the west hill

Pasture      but we who were born there

Still are not sure. Are we,

Because we remember, remembered

In the terrible dust of museums?

Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may   

Be saying      saying

         I am here, in my father’s house.

         I who am half of your world, came deeply

         To my mother in the long grass

         Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight

         Listening for foxes. It was something like love

         From another world that seized her

         From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head   

         Out of dew, without ever looking, her best

         Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face   

         Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound   

         Of sobbing      of something stumbling

         Away, began, as she must do,

         To carry me. I woke, dying,

         In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes

         Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment   

         The great grassy world from both sides,

         Man and beast in the round of their need,

         And the hill wind stirred in my wool,

         My hoof and my hand clasped each other,

         I ate my one meal

         Of milk, and died

         Staring. From dark grass I came straight

         

         To my father’s house, whose dust

         Whirls up in the halls for no reason

         When no one comes      piling deep in a hellish mild corner,   

         And, through my immortal waters,

         I meet the sun’s grains eye

         To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.

         Dead, I am most surely living

         In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives

         Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf

         And from the chaste ewe in the wind.

         They go into woods      into bean fields      they go

         Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,   

         They groan      they wait      they suffer

         Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.