BOOKS
473
I want
everybody
to see my lobster
I
This'll
be
a
healing
lobster:
Not Cancer. People will pray to him. He'll have a good effect
On time.
Now what I want to do is stretch him out
Jesus Christ, I'm drunk
I said stretch stretch
Him out is what I said stretch him out for millions
Of light years. His eye his eye
I'll make blue-white, so that the thing
Will cut and go deep and heal. God, the
claws
that son-of-a-bitch
Is going to get from Youl The clock-spire is telling me
To lie
for glory. This is a poet talking
to
You
Like you talked to yourself, when you made all this up while you conceived
The Zodiac. From every tower in Europe:
From my lifework and stupid travels and loneliness
And drunkenness, I'm changing the heavens
In my head. Get up there, baby, and dance on your claws:
On the claws God's going to give you.
By contrast, the desperation is literary, a cultivated mode with little
emotional resonance. Its self-deflating tone possibly issues from an
embarrassment Dickey may feel at some of his own grandiosity:
Son of a bitch.
His life is shot my life is shot.
It's also shit. He knows it. Where's it all gone off to?
Literariness is a surprisingly prevalent flaw in the poem. Too
many of the poem's shaping images are really only conceits, too brittle
and "witty" to lend much supportive strength. The elaborate game of
white-paper-light-ink-night-black that appeared in one of the quota–
tions above does not exhaust the poem's cleverness with color, and after
I finished reading the section which reveals that the crab is Cancer
which eats like time does-time is cancer, time is crab, crabs eat-I
wondered whether the poem wasn't getting just a little self-infatuated.
I suppose that a poem with metaphysical concerns is permitted some
metaphysical conceits, is licensed to track down some of fate's more
ingenious and confidential equations; but Dickey permits himself too
much problem-solving and point-scoring.
