418
RICHARD HOWARD
Like the dead about to be
Born, I watch for signs:
by
kings
Escaping, by shadows,
by
the gods of the body
Made, when wounded skillfully,
And out of their minds, descending
To the dead.
...
In this first book of Dickey's then, there
is
an airIess mastery, a sense
of liturgical consummation, of life's chances being eliminated as we
follow the self's necessary scheme, that
is
quite stifling: as in those ad–
jectival tropics of Conrad's, nothing moves, every leaf attends the fatal
moment when its life or its death
is
appointed. Accident is expunged,
Being made illustrious with fate:
Those waters see no more
Than air, than sun, than stone,
And stare it blind: in love, in love.
One of the rare accommodations of circumstance these poems
afford is, as we might expect, in a version of warfare. Himself a
veteran of Air Force service in both WorId War II and the Korean
War, the violence of war's demands makes an appeal,
in
every sense,
to Dickey's understanding of honor, rank and vassalage, of the egali–
tarianism that is to be found within royal bonds:
Each eye is equal in the mighty head
Of milit.ary gold.
In these experiences, though, there is an opportunity for the singular
event to appear, occurrence construed as the subject of narration
rather than of ritual, and in the poem apdy called "The Performance"
the tone moves toward prose, toward an incident remembered rather
than merely rehearsed as it
is
separated out from an Eternal Return:
The last time I saw Donald Armstrong
He was staggering oddly off into the sun,
Going down, of the Philippine Islands.
I let my shovel fall, and put that hand
Above my eyes, and moved some way t,o one side.
...
But that scene, too, is actually a visionary recital: the narrator ima–
gines
his
imprisoned, about-to-be-executed comrade in arms
Doing all his lean tricks to amaze them-
The back somers,ault, the kip-up--
And at last, the stand on his hands,
