424
The creatur,es out one by one,
Each waiting alive in its own
Peculiar light to be found:
RICHARD HOWARD
The mouse in its bundle of terror,
The fox in the flame 'Of its hair,
And the snake in the form of all life.
The longing, though, to be free of what
is
contingent, of the liable
and limiting self, lies inside this story nonetheless, its irreducible core
and concept:
I understand
The voice of my singing father.
I shall be king of the wood.
Our double throne shall grow
Forever, until I see
The self
01
every substance
As it cr.ouches, hidden and fre e.
(CUntil I see the self of every substance."
To counter the thrust of
such desperate visions, some saving sense of the appearances in James
Dickey has summoned up William James's beautiful aphorism, and
acted upon it: "The deeper features of reality are found only in
perceptual experience." For a preponderant impulse in this second
book is entrusted to the limited, contingent, questioning experience of
an individual identity laboring to transform its husk into its spirit.
There
is
a quality of sundered occasions, now, about the titles-still
gerundive, but much more specific, as in "Hunting Civil War Relics
at Nimblewill Creek" or "To Landrum Guy, Beginning to Write at
Sixty," or "A Dog Sleeping on My Feet." There are portraits of
temporal sites, like "The Salt Marsh":
All you can see are the tall
Stalks of sawgrass, not sawing,
But each of them holding its tip
Exactly where your hair
Begins to grow from your forehead.
Wherever you come to is
The same as before.
...
About such an accuracy, such an incursion upon what may
be
known,
there
is
an intensity and an inclusiveness which
earns
rather than
merely surrenders to the inescapable leap into spirit:
