At last within it, dancing.
Slowly we tum and shine
Vpon what
is
holding us,
As
under our feet he soars,
Struck dumb as the angel of Eden,
In wide, eye-opening
rings.
Yet the hand on my shoulder fears
To feel my own wing-blades spring,
To feel me sink slowly away
In my hair turned loose like a thought
Of a flSher-bird dying in flight.
If
I opened my arms, I could hear
Every shell in the sea find the word
It has tried to put into my mouth.
Broad flight would become of my dancing,
And I would obsess the whole sea,
But I keep rising and singing
With my last breath. Upon my back,
With
his
hand on my unborn wing,
A man rests easy as sunlight
Who has kept himself free of the forms
Of the deaf, down-soaring dead,
And me laid-out and alive
For nothing at all, in his arms.
James Dickey
