James Dickey: The Selected Poems

Tapestry and Sail

TAPESTRYAND SAIL She Imagines Herselfa Figure Upon Them A wrong look into heavy stone And twilight, wove my body, And I was snowing with the withering hiss ofthread. My head was last, and with it came An eyesight needle-pointing like a thorn-bush. I came to pass slant-lit, Heaven-keeping with the rest Of the museum, causing History to hang clear ofearth With me in it, carded and blazing. Rigidly, I swayed Among those morningless strings, like stained glas~ Avertedly yearning: here a tree a Lord There a falcon on fist an eagle Worried into cloud, strained up On gagging filaments there a compacted antelope With such apparent motion stitched to death That God would pluck His image Clean offeathers ifI leapt or breathed Over the smothered plain: the Past, hung up like beast-hides, Half-eaten, half-stolen, Not enough. Well, I was not for it: I stubborned in that lost wall Ofover-worked dust, and came away in high wind, Rattling and flaring On the lodge-pole craze and flutter of the sail, Confounding, slatting and flocking, On-going with manhandled drift, wide-open in the lightning's Re-emphasizing split, the sea's holy no-win roar. I took the right pose coming off The air, and ofa wild and ghostly battering Puella 161 Was born, and signed-on and now steady down To movement, to the cloth's relationless flurries, Sparring for recovery feather-battling lulling, Tautening and resolving, dwelling slowly. ...