James Dickey - Buckdancer’s Choice: Poems

Buckdancers Choice Other books by James Dickey Poetry Into the Stone Drowning with Others Helmets Two Poems of the Air 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 Vrmland Falling, May Day Sermon, and Other Poems False Youth Puella The Central Motion: Poems 19681979 The Eagles Mile Prose Jericho: The South Beheld Gods Images Wayfarer Fiction Deliverance Alnilam Childrens 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 Poems by JAMES DICKEYWESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Middletown, Connecticut WESLEYAN POETRY Published by Wesleyan University Press Middletown, CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress 1964, 1965 by James Dickey All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 Acknowledgment is gratefully made to the following magazines in which these poems first appeared: The Bulletin; Harpers; The Hudson Review; The Kenyon Review; Partisan Review; Quarterly Review of Literature; The Southern Review; Virginia Quarterly Review; Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, which published The Firebombing; and The New Yorker, which published Angina, The Aura, Buckdancers Choice, The Common Grave, The Escape, Reincarnation, The Sharks Parlor, Them, Crying, The War Wound, and a slightly shorter version of Slave Quarters. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dickey, James. Buckdancers choice: poems by James Dickey. p. cm. Title. Title.

PS3507.I268B8 811.54 65-21079 To Maibelle Swift Dickey
and
Eugene Dickey life-givers

Buckdancers Choice Denke daran, dass nach den grossen Zerstrungen Jedermann beweisen wird, dass er unschuldig war. Gnter Eich Or hast thou an arm like God? The Book of Job Homeowners unite. All families lie together, though some are burned alive. The others try to feel For them. Some can, it is often said. Starve and take off Twenty years in the suburbs, and the palm trees willingly leap Into the flashlights, And there is beneath them also A booted crackling of snailshells and coral sticks.

There are cowl flaps and the tilt cross of propellers, The shovel-marked clouds far sides against the moon, The enemy filling up the hills With ceremonial graves. At my somewhere among these, Snap, a bulb is tricked on in the cockpit And some technical-minded stranger with my hands Is sitting in a glass treasure-hole of blue light, Having potential fire under the undeodorized arms Of his wings, on thin bomb-shackles, The tear-drop-shaped 300-gallon drop-tanks Filled with napalm and gasoline. Thinking forward ten minutes From that, there is also the burst straight out Of the overcast into the moon; there is now The moon-metal-shine of propellers, the quarter moonstone, aimed at the waves, Stopped on the cumulus. There is then this re-entry Into cloud, for the engines to ponder their sound. In white dark the aircraft shrinks; Japan Dilates around it like a thought. Coming out, the one who is here is over Land, passing over the all-night grainfields, In dark paint over The woods with one silver side, Rice-water calm at all levels Of the terraced hill.

Enemy rivers and trees Sliding off me like snakeskin, Strips of vapor spooled from the wingtips Going invisible passing over on Over bridges roads for nightwalkers Sunday night in the enemys country absolute Calm the moons face coming slowly About the inland sea Slants is woven with wire thread Levels out holds together like a quilt Off the starboard wing cloud flickers At my glassed-off forehead the moons now and again Uninterrupted face going forward Over the waves in a glide-path Lost into land. Going: going with it Combat booze by my side in a cratered canteen, Bourbon frighteningly mixed With GI pineapple juice, Dogs trembling under me for hundreds of miles, on many Islands, sleep-smelling that ungodly mixture Of napalm and high-octane fuel, Good bourbon and GI juice. Rivers circling behind me around Come to the fore, and bring A town with everyone darkened. Five thousand people are sleeping off An all-day American drone. Twenty years in the suburbs have not shown me Which ones were hit and which not. Haul on the wheel racking slowly The aircraft blackly around In a dark dream that that is That is like flying inside someones head Think of this think of this I did not think of my house But think of my house now Where the lawn mower rests on its laurels Where the diet exists For my own good where I try to drop Twenty years, eating figs in the pantry Blinded by each and all Of the eye-catching cans that gladly have caught my wifes eye Until I cannot say Where the screwdriver is where the children Get off the bus where the new Scoutmaster lives where the fly Hones his front legs where the hammock folds Its erotic daydreams where the Sunday School text for the day has been put where the fire Wood is where the payments For everything under the sun Pile peacefully up, But in this half-paid-for pantry Among the red lids that screw off With an easy half-twist to the left And the long drawers crammed with dim spoons, I still have chargesecret charge Of the fire developed to cling To everything: to golf carts and fingernail Scissors as yet unborn tennis shoes Grocery baskets toy fire engines New Buicks stalled by the half-moon Shining at midnight on crossroads green paint Of jolly garden tools red Christmas ribbons: Not atoms, these, but glue inspired By love of country to burn, The apotheosis of gelatin.

Behind me having risen the Southern Cross Set up by chaplains in the Ryukyus Orion, Scorpio, the immortal silver Like the myths of king insects at swarming time One mosquito, dead drunk On altitude, drones on, far under the engines, And bites between The oxygen mask and the eye. The enemy-colored skin of families Determines to hold its color In sleep, as my hand turns whiter Than ever, clutching the toggle The ship shakes bucks Fire hangs not yet fire In the air above Beppu For I am fulfilling An anti-morale raid upon it. All leashes of dogs Break under the first bomb, around those In bed, or late in the public baths: around those Who inch forward on their hands Into medicinal waters. Their heads come up with a roar Of Chicago fire: Come up with the carp pond showing The bathhouse upside down, Standing stiller to show it more As I sail artistically over The resort town followed by farms, Singing and twisting All the handles in heaven kicking The small cattle off their feet In a red costly blast Flinging jelly over the walls As in a chemical war fare field demonstration. With fire of mine like a cat Holding onto another mans walls, My hat should crawl on my head In streetcars, thinking of it, The fat on my body should pale. Gun down The engines, the eight blades sighing For the moment when the roofs will connect Their flames, and make a town burning with all American fire.

Reflections of houses catch; Fire shuttles from pond to pond In every direction, till hundreds flash with one death. With this in the dark of the mind, Death will not be what it should; Will not, even now, even when My exhaled face in the mirror Of bars, dilates in a cloud like Japan. The death of children is ponds Shutter-flashing; responding mirrors; it climbs The terraces of hills Smaller and smaller, a mote of red dust At a hundred feet; at a hundred and one it goes out. That is what should have got in To my eye And shown the insides of houses, the low tables Catch fire from the floor mats, Blaze up in gas around their heads Like a dream of suddenly growing Too intense for war. Ah, under ones dark arms Something strange-scented falls when those on earth Die, there is not even sound; One is cool and enthralled in the cockpit, Turned blue by the power of beauty, In a pale treasure-hole of soft light Deep in aesthetic contemplation, Seeing the ponds catch fire And cast it through ring after ring Of land: O death in the middle Of acres of inch-deep water! Useless Firing small arms Speckles from the river Bank one ninety-millimeter Misses far down wrong petals gone It is this detachment, The honored aesthetic evil, The greatest sense of power in ones life, That must be shed in bars, or by whatever Means, by starvation Visions in well-stocked pantries: The moment when the moon sails in between The tail-booms the rudders nod I swing Over directly over the heart The