dira | (no subject)

katie_m posted a poem I love (Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts") in honor of Poem in Your Pocket Day, and I wanted to post a favorite of mine, only it turned out that it isn't on the internet. Lucky for my desire to share, I work right next door to one of the best university libraries in the country (*snif*. I miss working *in* it...) and I was able to pop over there and snag a copy of James Dickey's collected works off the third floor.

So.

In the Mountain Tent
James Dickey

I am hearing the shape of the rain
Take the shape of the tent and believe it,
Laying down all around where I lie
A profound, unspeakable law.
I obey, and am free-falling slowly

Through the thought-out leaves of the wood
Into the minds of animals.
I am there in the shining of water
Like dark, like light, out of Heaven.

I am there like the dead, or the beast
Itself, which thinks of a poem--
Green, plausible, living, and holy--
And cannot speak, but hears,
Called forth from the waiting of things,

A vast, proper, reinforced crying
With the sifted, harmonious pause,
The sustained intake of all breath
Before the first word of the Bible.

At midnight water dawns
Upon the held skulls of the foxes
And weasels and tousled hares
On the eastern side of the mountain.
Their light is the image I make

As I wait as if recently killed,
Receptive, fragile, half-smiling,
My brow watermarked with the mark
On the wing of a moth

And the tent taking the shape of my body
Like ill-fitting, Heavenly clothes.
From the holes in the ground comes my voice
In the God-silenced tongue of the beasts.
"I shall rise from the dead," I am saying.

Of course, it turns out I'd only ever read the first two stanzas of the poem (that was as much as would fit on a page-a-day poetry calendar, I guess...) and I'm not sure I like the rest of it as much, but I'm feeling completist, so there it all is.

I should really tell my mom sometime that that was the coolest page-a-day calendar ever, so maybe she'd stop buying me embarrassingly bad ones for Christmas every year. They always wind up at the bottom of my closet or riding around the trunk of my car for months before I can bring myself to throw them out.