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sexual experience with a woman who visits him. For most of the poem
the hero is a kind of poetic crab, crawling around the night sky and
being crawled over by the constellation-beasts inside his sick, drunk
head. He is trying to use his poetry to find a personal pattern in the
existing pattern above him, trying
to
put himself in the poem of the
universe as a new line making a new poem.
The subject, then , is the transforming imagination desperately
trying to be itself transformed. This is a Faustian theme, but unlike
Faust the hero of Dickey's poem doesn't know the formulas of incanta–
tion that will put him in touch with whatever is out there. He must live
through the limbo-misery of trying to invent them, trying to become at
least the Faust of act one before he dies.
In
The Zodiac
Dickey is concerned, for a change, with how to
relate the self to the pattern of things in some other way than by dying
or evaporating into it. In Dickey's previous work, especially the
ambitious
Falling
and
Mayday Sermon,
one saved onself by consuming
oneself. One had to burn up one's precious ration of corporeality to
transcend the powers of custom and of self that had subjugated that
corporeality-one destroyed it to liberate it. Visionary, over-heated,
D.H. Lawrence whirled one more flight up the stairs toward hysteria.
Is there a cooler way,
The Zodiac
seems to ask in dialectic with Dickey's
past work.
If
we add the mind to the body this time, connect them
wilh lhe poem
That links up my balls and the strange, silent words
can we cool things down to thinkable temperatures?
The poem is a mixture, strange for Dickey, of the heightened–
bravado and despair-and the humble-plain conversation.
Even drunk
Even in the white, whiskey-struck, splintered SLar of a boule-room
dancing
He knows he's not fooling himself he knows
Not a damn thing of Slars of God of space
Of time
love night death sex fire numbers signs words,
Not much of poetry. But by God, we've got a
universe
Here
Those designs of Lime are saying
something
Or maybe somelhing or
other.
