The Eagle’s Mile

The Eagle's Mile

The Eagle's Mile for Justice William Douglas The Emmet's Inch & Eagle's Mile —Blake Unwarned, catch into this With everything you have: the trout streaming with all its quick In the strong curve all things on all sides In motion the soul strenuous And still in time-flow as in water blowing Fresh and for a long time Downhill something like air it is Also and it is dawn There in merciless look-down As though an eagle or Adam In lightning, or both, were watching uncontrollably For meat, among the leaves. Douglas, with you The soul tries it one-eyed, half your sight left hanging in a river In England, long before you died, And now that one, that and the new one Struck from death's instant— Lightning's: like mankind on impulse blindsiding God—true-up together and ride On silence, enraptured surveillance, The eagle's mile. Catch into this, and broaden Into and over The mountain rivers, over the leaf-tunnel path: Appalachia, where the trail lies always hidden 2-5 Like prey, through the trembling south-north of the forest Continent, from Springer Mountain to Maine, And you may walk Using not surpassing The trout's hoisted stand-off with the channel, Or power-hang the same in the shattered nerves Of lightning: like Adam find yourself splintering out Somewhere on the eagle's mile, on peerless, barbaric distance Clairvoyant with hunger, Or can begin can be begin to be What out-gentles, and may evade: This second of the second year Of death, it would be best for the living If it were your impulse to step out of grass-bed sleep As valuably as cautiously As a spike-buck, head humming with the first male split Of the brain-bone, as it tunes to the forked twigs Of the long trail Where Douglas you once walked in a white shirt as a man In the early fall, fire-breathing with oak-leaves, Your patched tunnel-gaze exactly right For the buried track, the England-curved water strong Far-off with your other sight, both fresh-waters marbling together Supporting not surpassing What flows what balances In it. Douglas, power-hang in it all now, for all The whole thing is worth: catch without warning 26 Somewhere in the North Georgia creek like ghost-muscle tensing Forever, or on the high grass-bed Yellow of dawn, catch like a man stamp-printed by Godshock , blue as the very foot Of fire. Catch into the hunted Horns of the buck, and thus into the deepest hearing— Nerveless, all bone, bone-tuned To leaves and twigs—with the grass drying wildly When you woke where you stood with all blades rising Behind you, and stepped out possessing the trail, The racked bramble on either side shining Like a hornet, your death drawing life From growth from flow, as in the gill-cleansing turn Of the creek or from the fountain-twist Of flight, that rounds you Off, and shies you downwind Side-faced, all-seeing with hunger, And over this, steep and straight-up In the eagle's mile Let Adam, far from the closed smoke of mills And blue as the foot Of every flame, true-up with blind-side outflash The once-more instantly Wild world: over Brasstown Bald Splinter uncontrollably whole. 27 ...