The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992

The Escape

The Escape From my great-grandmother on, My family lies at Fairmount In a small rigid house ofTate marble. A Civil War general, a small one, Rises into the air, Always fifty feet away, And there are always flowers Surrounding him as he lifts His sword and calls back over his shoulder To his troops, none ofwhich lie Under the decent plots and polished stones Ofthe civilian dead. Once I saw, Or said I did, a lily wrapped Around his tense hand and sword hilt. An enormous glass-fronted hospital Rises across the street, the traffic Roars equally from all four sides, And often, from a textile mill, A teen-age girl wanders by, Her head in a singing cloth Still humming with bobbins and looms. In summer, the hospital orderlies eat Their lunches on the lawn From wet-spotted brown paper bags, While behind them the portioned glass Ofthe hospital blindingly fits The noon sun together: A tremendous vertical blaze From which one piece-off-center, northwestIs gone, where a window is open. I have escaped from Fairmount Through that square hole in the light, Having found where that piece ofthe sun's Stupendous puzzle resides. It is Lying in the woods, in a small, unfenced County graveyard in Alabama. It is on an open book Ofcardboard and paper, a simulated Bible, The Escape / 2I I All white, like a giant bride's, The only real pages the ones The book opens to; light From the trees is falling squarely On the few large, hand-written words. On a hunting trip I walked through That place, far from all relatives And wars, from bobbins and lilies and trucks. Because ofwhat I had seen, I walked through the evergreen gates Ofthe forest ranger's station, And out to my car, and drove To the county seat, and bought My own secret grave-plot there For thirty-seven dollars and a half. A young deer, a spike buck, stood Among the graves, slowly puzzling out The not-quite-edible words Ofthe book lying under A panel ofthe sun forever Missing from the noonlight ofFairmount. I remember that, and sleep Easier, seeing the animal head Nuzzling the fragment ofScripture, Browsing, before the first blotting rain On the fragile book Ofthe new dead, on words I take care, Even in sleep, not to read, Hoping for Genesis. The Sharlfs Parlor Memory: I can take my head and strike it on a wall on Cumberland Island Where the night tide came crawling under the stairs came up the first Two or three steps and the cottage stood on poles all night With the sea sprawled under it as we dreamed ofthe great fin circling Under the bedroom floor. In daylight there was my first brassy taste of beer Buckdancer's Choice / 2 I2 ...