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, Then 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. Think 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 enemy’s country absolute Calm the moon’s 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 moon’s 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 black around In a dark dream that that is That is like flying inside someone’s 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 wife’s 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 charge – secret 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 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 man’s walls, My hat should crawl on my headIn 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 one’s 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 one’s 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 heart of the fire. A mosquito burns out on my cheek With the cold of my face there are the eyes In blue light bar light All masked but them the moon Crossing from left to right in the streams below Oriental fish form quickly In the chemical shine, In their eyes one tiny seed Of deranged, Old Testament light. Letting go letting go The plane rises gently dark forms Glide off me long water pales In safe zones a new cry enters The voice box of chained family dogs We buck leap over something Not there settle back Leave it leave it clinging and crying It consumer them in a hot Body-flash, old age or menopause Of children, clings and burns Eating through And when a reed mat catches fire From me, it explodes through field after field Bearing its sleeper another Bomb finds a home And clings to it like a child. And so Goodbye to the grassy mountains To cloud streaming from the night engines Flags pennons curved silks Of air myself streaming also My body covered With flags, the air of flags Between the engines. Forever I do sleep in that position, Forever in a turn For home that breaks out streaming banners From my wingtips, Wholly in position to admire. O then I knock it off And turn for home over the black complex thread worked through The silver night-sea, Following the huge, moon-washed steppingstones Of the Ryukyus south, The nightgrass of mountains billowing softly In my rising heat. Turn and tread down The yellow stones of the islands To where Okinawa burns, Pure gold, on the radar screen, Beholding, beneath, the actual island form In the vast water-silver poured just above solid ground, An inch of water extending for thousands of miles Above flat ploughland. Say “down,” and it is done. All this, and I am still hungry, Still twenty years overweight, still unable To get down there or see What really happened. But it may be that I could not, If I tried, say to any Who lived there, deep in my flames: say, in cold Grinning sweat, as to another As these homeowners who are always curving Near me down the different-grassed street: say As though to the neighbor I borrowed the hedge-clippers from On the darker-grassed side of the two, Come in, my house is yours, come in If you can, if you Can pass this unfired door. It is that I can imagine At the threshold nothing With its ears crackling off Like powdery leaves, Nothing with children of ashes, nothing not Amiable, gentle, well-meaning, A little nervous for no Reason a little worried a little too loud Or too easygoing nothing I haven’t lived with For twenty years, still nothing not as American as I am, and proud of it. Absolution? Sentence? No matter; The thing itself is in that. - James Dickey, 1964
Posted on: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 21:39:31 +0000
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