James Dickey: The Selected Poems

The Eye-Beaters

A man visits a Homefor children in Indiana, some of whom have gone blind there. A therapist exp!4ins why the children strike their eyes. The Visitor begins to inventa fiction to save his mind THE EYE-BEATERS For Mary Bookwalter Come something come blood sunlight come and they break Through the child-wall, taking heart from the two left feet Ofyour sound: are groping for the Visitor in the tall corn Green ofIndiana. You may be light, for they have seen it comIng From people: have seen it on cricket and brick have seen it Seen it fade seen slowly the edge ofthings fail all corn Green fail heard fields grind press with insects and go round To the back ofthe head. They are blind. Listen listen well To your walking that gathers the blind in bonds gathers these Who have fought with themselves have blacked their eyes wide Open, toddling like dolls and like penguins soft-knotted down, Protected, arms bound to their sides in gauze, but dark is not To be stood in that way: they holler howl till they can shred Their gentle ropes whirl and come loose. They know they should see But what, now? When their fists smash their eyeballs, they behold no Stranger giving light from his palms. What they glimpse has flared In mankind from the beginning. In the asylum, children turn to go back Into the race: turn their heads without comment into the black magIC Migraine ofcaves. Smudge-eyed, wide-eyed, gouged, horned, cavedin , they are silent: it is for you to guess what they hold back inside The brown and hazel inside the failed green the vacant blueeyed floating ofthe soul. Was that lightning was that a heartstruck leap somewhere before birth? Why do you eat the green summer Air like smoky meat? Ah, Stranger, you do not visit this place, You live or die in it you brain-scream you beat your eyes to see The junebug take offbackwards spin connect his body-sound reo tries to ~what 'eysee hen they ~attheir 'es. To what he is in the air. But under the fist, on the hand-stomped bone, A bison leaps out ofrock fades a long-haired nine-year-old clubs Her eye, imploding with vision dark bright again again agaIn A beast, before her arms are tied. Can it be? Lord, when they slug Their blue cheeks blacker, can it be that they do not see the wings And green ofinsects or the therapist suffering kindly but a tribal light old Enough to be seen without sight? There, quiet children stand watching A man striped and heavy with pigment, lift his hands with color comIng From him. Bestial, working like God, he moves on stone he is drawing A half-cloud of beasts on the wall. They crane closer, helping, beating Harder, light blazing inward from their fists and see see leap From the shocked head-nerves, great herds ofdeer on the hacked glory plain Ofthe cave wall: antelope elk: blind children strike for the middle Ofthe brain, where the race is young. Stranger, they stand here And fill your mind with beasts: ibex quagga rhinoceros of woolgathering smoke: cave bear aurochs mammoth: beings that appear Only in the memory ofcaves the niches filled, not with Virgins, But with the squat shapes ofthe Mother. In glimmers of midbrain pain The forms ofanimals are struck like water from the stone where hunger And rage where the Visitor's helplessness and terror all Move on the walls and create. (Look up: the sun is taking its stand on four The Eye Beaters 139 His Reason argues with his invention . 0'clock ofIndiana time, painfully blazing fist ofa ball offire God struck from His one eye.) No; you see only beasts playing In the bloody handprint on the stone where God gropes like a man Like a child, for animals where the artist hunts and slashes, glowing Like entrail-blood, tracking the wounded game across the limestone As it is conceived. The spoor leads his hand changes grows Hair like a bison horns like an elk unshapes in a deerleap emerges From the spear-pitted rock, becoming what it can make unrolling Not sparing itselfclenching re-forming rising beating For light. Ah, you think it, Stranger: you'd like thatyou try hard To think it, to thinkfor them. But whatyou see, in the half inner sight Ofsquinting, are onlyfields only children whose hands are tied away From themfor their...