James Dickey: The Selected Poems

Slave Quarters

SLAVE QUARTERS In the great place the great house is gone from in the sun Room, near the kitchen ofair I look across at low walls Ofslave quarters, and feel my imagining loins Rise with the madness ofOwners To take off the Master's white clothes And slide all the way into moonlight Two hundred years ago with this moon. Let me go, Ablaze with myoid mescent , in moonlight made by my mind From the dusk sun, in the yard where my dogs would smell For once what I totally am, Flaming up in their brains as the Master They but dimly had sensed through my clothes: Let me stand as though moving At midnight, now at the instant ofsundown When the wind turns From sea wind to land, and the marsh grass Hovers, changing direction: there was this house That fell before I got out. I can pull It over me where I stand, up from the earth, Back out of the shells Ofthe sea: become with the change of this air A coastal islander, proud ofhis grounds, His dogs, his spinet From Savannah, his pale daughters, His war with the sawgrass, pushed back into The sea it crawled from. Nearer dark, unseen, I can begin to dance Buckdancer's Choice 91 Inside my gabardine suit As though I had left my silk nightshirt In the hall of mahogany, and crept To slave quarters to live out The secret legend of Owners. Ah, stand up, Blond loins, another Love is possible! My thin wife would be sleeping Or would not mention my absence: the moonlight On these rocks can be picked like cotton Bya crazed Owner dancing-mad With the secret repossession ofhis body Phosphorescent and mindless, shedding Blond-headed shadow on the sand, Hounds pressing in their sleep Around him, smelling his footblood On the strange ground that lies between skins With the roof blowing offslave quarters To let the moon in burning The years away In just that corner where crabgrass proves it lives Outside oftime. Who seeks the other color ofhis body, His loins giving offa frail light On the dark lively shipwreck ofgrass sees Water live where The half-moon touches, The moon made whole in one wave Very far from the silent piano the copy ofWalter Scott Closed on its thin-papered battles Where his daughter practiced, decorum preventing the one Bead ofsweat in all that lace collected at her throat From breaking and humanly running Over Mozart's unmortal keys- I come past A sand crab pacing sideways his eyes out On stalks the bug-eyed vision offiddler Crabs sneaking a light on the run From the split moon holding in it a white man stepping Down the road ofclamshells and cotton his eyes out On stems the tops ofthe sugar Cane soaring the sawgrass walking: I come past The stale pools left Over from high tide where the crab in the night sand Is basting himselfwith his claws moving ripples outward Feasting on brightness and above A gull also crabs slowly, Tacks, jibes then turning the corner Ofwind, receives himselflike a brother As he glides down upon his reflection: My body has a color not yet freed: In that ruined house let me throw Obsessive gentility off; Let Mrica rise upon me like a man Whose instincts are delivered from their chains Where they lay close-packed and wide-eyed In muslin sheets As though in the miserly holding Oftoo many breaths by one ship. Now Worked in silver their work lies all Around me the fields dissolving Into the sea and not on a horse I stoop to the soil working Gathering moving to the rhythm ofa music That has crossed the ocean in chains. In the grass the great singing void ofslave Buckdancer's Choice 93 94 Labor about me the moonlight bringing Sweat out ofmy back as though the sun Changed skins upon me some other Man moving near me on horseback whom I look in the eyes Once a day: there in that corner Her bed turned to grass. Unsheltered by these walls The outside fields form slowly Anew, in a kind ofbarreling blowing, Bend in all the right places as faintly Michael rows The boat ashore his spiritual lungs Entirely filling the sail. How take on the guilt Ofslavers? How shudder like one who made Money from buying a people To work as ghosts In this blowing solitude? I only stand here upon shells dressed poorly For...