Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

The Falls

J A M E S D I C K E Y The Falls Upon the light, bare, breathless water To step, and thereby be given a skiff That hangs by its nose to the bank And trembles backward: To stand on those boards like a prince Whose kingdom is still as a cloud, And through it, like a road through Heaven, The river moves: To sink to the floor of the boat As into a deep, straining coffin, And in one motion come from my mother, Loose the long cord: To lie here timelessly flowing In a bed that lives like a serpent, And thus to extend my four limbs From the spring to the sea: To look purely into the sky, As the current possesses my body Like a wind, and blows me through Land I have walked on, And all in a pattern laid down By rain, and the forces of age, Through banks of red clay, and cane-fields, And the heart of a forest: 6 ❚ The Late 1950s and the 1960s And at dusk to hear the far falls Risingly roaring to meet me, And, set in that sound, eternal Excitement of falling: And yet, strangely, still to be Upheld on the road to Heaven Through the changing, never-changed earth Of this lived land: And now in all ways to be drunken, With a mind that can lift up my body In all the grounded music of the dead Now nearer their rising: To do nothing but rest in my smile, With nothing to do but go downward Simply when water shall fall In the mineral glimmer Of the lightning that lies at the end Of the wandering path of escape Through the fields and green clouds of my birth, And bears me on, Ecstatic, indifferent, and My mother’s son, to where insupportable water Shall dress me in blinding clothes For my descent. The Late 1950s and the 1960s ❚ 7 ...