James Dickey Poems

Off Highway 106
At Cherrylog Road I entered
The ’34 Ford without wheels,
Smothered in kudzu,
...

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
...

And now the green household is dark.
The half-moon completely is shining
On the earth-lighted tops of the trees.
...

So I would hear out those lungs,
The air split into nine levels,
Some gift of tongues of the whistler
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Bums, on waking,
Do not always find themselves
In gutters with water running over their legs
And the pillow of the curbstone
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Ethereal and supreme
Of tersest heaven it
has pronounced a daily storm
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What field-forms can be,
Outlying the small civic light-decisions over
A man walking near home?
...

The sea here used to look
As if many convicts had built it,
...

Beginning to dangle beneath
The wind that blows from the undermined wood,
I feel the great pulley grind,
...