James L. Dickey

So I would hear out those lungs, The air split into nine levels, Some gift of tongues of the whistler In the invalid’s bed: my mother, Warbling all day to herself The thousand variations of one song; It is called Buckdancer’s Choice. For years, they have all been dying Out, the classic buck-and-wing men Of traveling minstrel shows; With them also an old woman Was dying of breathless angina, Yet still found breath enough To whistle up in my head A sight like a one-man band, Freed black, with cymbals at heel, An ex-slave who thrivingly danced To the ring of his own clashing light Through the thousand variations of one song All day to my mother’s prone music, The invalid’s warbler’s note, While I crept close to the wall Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter, Her tongue like a mockingbird’s break Through stratum after stratum of a tone Proclaiming what choices there are For the last dancers of their kind, For ill women and for all slaves Of death, and children enchanted at walls With a brass-beating glow underfoot, Not dancing but nearly risen Through barnlike, theatrelike houses On the wings of the buck and wing.

The sea here used to look As if many convicts had built it, Standing deep in their ankle chains, Ankle-deep in the water, to smite The land and break it down to salt. I was in this bog as a child When they were all working all day To drive the pilings down. I thought I saw the still sun Strike the side of a hammer in flight And from it a sea bird be born To take off over the marshes. As the gray climbs the side of my head And cuts my brain off from the world, I walk and wish mainly for birds, For the one bird no one has looked for To spring again from a flash Of metal, perhaps from the scratched Wedding band on my ring finger. Recalling the chains of their feet, I stand and look out over grasses At the bridge they built, long abandoned, Breaking down into water at last, And long, like them, for freedom Or death, or to believe again That they worked on the ocean to give it The unchanging, hopeless look Out of which all miracles leap.