by NONA BLYTH CLOUD
On Friday, July 24, 2015, my very first “Word Cloud” appeared at Flowers for Socrates. There’s been another one every Friday since, so I’ve now posted 52 profiles at this site.
The first poet I wrote about was James Dickey. I didn’t know how to use most of the World Press layout options (something I’m still learning), so I kept it simple.
Black ink on white background, not many visual enhancements – and short.
I wondered if there were any readers out there who would be willing to look at more than one poem.
So a virtual Toast and a THANK YOU to everybody who viewed “Word Cloud” during this first year, especially those of you who took the time to click “Like” or make a comment.
THANK YOU to all of you who tuned in later, connected with what you read, then checked out some of my earlier posts.
And a special THANK YOU if you’ve come back on Fridays for more.
At the end of this post, you’ll see the bibliography for James Dickey’s many books of poetry — I really didn’t do his work justice last year.
Here then are a few more of his poems that I especially like:
In the Marble Quarry
Beginning to dangle beneath
The wind that blows from the undermined wood,
I feel the great pulley grind,
The thread I cling to lengthen
And let me soaring and spinning down into marble,
Hooked and weightlessly happy
Where the squared sun shines
Back equally from all four sides, out of stone
And years of dazzling labor,
To land at last among men
Who cut with power saws a Parian whiteness
And, chewing slow tobacco,
Their eyebrows like frost,
Shunt house-sized blocks and lash them to cables
And send them heavenward
Into small-town banks,
Into the columns and statues of government buildings,
But mostly graves.
I mount my monument and rise
Slowly and spinningly from the white-gloved men
Toward the hewn sky
Out of the basement of light,
Sadly, lifted through time’s blinding layers
On perhaps my tombstone
In which the original shape
Michelangelo believed was in every rock upon earth
Is heavily stirring,
Surprised to be an angel,
To be waked in North Georgia by the ponderous play
Of men with ten-ton blocks
But no more surprised than I
To feel sadness fall off as though I myself
Were rising from stone
Held by a thread in midair,
Badly cut, local-looking, and totally uninspired,
Not a masterwork
Or even worth seeing at all
But the spirit of this place just the same,
Felt here as joy.
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