(Arjun's grave beside our garden)
I found James Dickey's poetry one Friday night in the Wesleyan College Library. Just about everybody was out on dates, so I had the place to myself, including the whole American poetry section. That's where I first read The Heaven of Animals, which remains one of my favorite Dickey poems. I thought of it again last night after reading Vicki Lane's post on her blog (see sidebar) about her "sweet Bear" having died under the willow where she liked to sleep. After the loss of our sweet Arjun, that news carried an especially sad weight. Dickey's poem moves into the predator/prey imagery as it closes, which isn't surprising, given Dickey's experience and literary persona as hunter (yes, of various and sundry prey, in the woods and on cocktail/reading circuits). I prefer the first three stanzas when I think of Arjun and Bear.
For Arj, I would have his favorite bush, the one we called his house because he furnished it with old flowerpots and pieces of fence, spreading endlessly over him, and a young girl's lap as capacious the universe, endlessly welcoming. I would have the hydrangea bush, where he also liked to sleep, always blooming.
For Bear, I imagine a willow tree spreading its ongoing canopy as if over a Queen, fields always brimful with scents to snuffle and rabbits to chase, and an unceasing creek to splash into during the heat of the eternal afternoon.
The Heaven of Animals
by James L. Dickey
Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.
Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.
To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.
For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey
May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk
Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain
At the cycle’s center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.
James Dickey, “The Heaven of Animals” from The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945-1992. Copyright © 1992 by James Dickey. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress.
