RICHARD HOWARD
This is on a grave he has previously seen in a country cemetery in Ala–
bama, where a young deer was standing among the tombstones, puzzling
out the "not-quite-edible words of the book lying under / a panel of
the surf":
I remember that, and sleep
Easier, seeing the animal head
Nuzzling the frogment of Scripture,
Browsing, before the first blotting rain
On the fragile book
Of the new dead, on words I take care,
Even in sleep, not to read,
Hoping for Genesis.
How different is that hope, and the tentative rhythm it assumes, from
the old certainties of regeneration of
Into the Stone!
Paired with it, in
the other determination of mortality, "The Common Grave," is the real–
ization that beyond the individual death
All creatures tumbled together
Get b'ack in their wildest arms
No single thing but each other.
and the final constatation is the last we might have expected from Dickey,
'the poet of Being, "revealed tremendously / in its fabulous, rigid, eternal /
unlooked-for role," for it is an acknowledgment of greater possibilities
than the One contains:
...
An oak tree breaks
Out and shoves for the moonlight,
Bearing lealles which shall murmur for years,
Dumbfoundedly, like mouths opened all at once
At just the wrong time t·o be heard,
Others, others.
Hoping for Genesis, believing in others (and no longer in kings)-
(
these are the gerundive moments of Dickey's fulfilled consciousness. They
are sustained by a compassion, in the shorter poems, unmatched by the
old will to power and unwarranted by the old metric. There is more
air around these words, more space between the lines. Even between
the
words
in some of the poems, the blanks stretch, suggesting not only
a pause in the reader's drone but a separateness in the writer's experience.
The lines are either broken off short or very long, but nowhere, in the
