DICKEY
427
That impulse-to disarm and confront one's naked humanity-is what
governs this entire book, its celebrations of life on earth and its
imagined figures : "where my breath takes shape on the air / like a
white helmet come from the lungs." The book begins with a group
of poems corresponding, in their chthonic pieties, to earlier pieces:
"The Dusk of Horses" is a pendent to "The Heaven of Animals" and
a part of Dickey's Georgia bestiary or foxhound fables:
No beast ever lived who understood
What happened among the sun's fields
Or
cared why the col'Or of grass
Fled over the hill while he stumbled,
Led
l:J.y
the halter to sleep
On his four taxed, worthy legs .
..
just as "At Darien Bridge" refers back to the dream landscapes and
heroic prowesses of "Near Darien" in the first book,
Into the Stone.
But where in the first poem concerned with this place the site is
enchanted ground and everything seen or sensed is miracle, every–
thing
is
given:
As I ride blindly home from the sun,
Not wishing t.o know how she came there,
Commanded by glorious powers:
At night by the night's 'One stone
Laid openly on the lost waves,
By her .eyes catching fire in the morning.
...
in the new poem, even in its more particular title, we are afforded the
circumstances, the details-that there is a bridge here built by chain
gangs, laboring ankle-deep in the water, that as a child the poet had
come here to watch them at work, that now the poet returns to the
place and with the wedding band on his ring finger "recalling the
chains of their feet" (for Dickey, marriage is a binding sacrament in
every sense of the term, another limiting condition of selfhood),
stands and looks out:
...
over grasses
At the bridge they built, long abandoned,
Breaking down into water at last,
And I long, like them, for freedom
