In "Someplace Away," a man lies in bed with a woman who is kind to him, and what should feel like arrival becomes a quiet study in absence. William Dickey gives us a speaker who is being touched, praised and welcomed, yet who has learned to keep part of himself permanently out of reach. The woman calls him "a true light in my wilderness" and grieves that they did not meet when they were young. His response is not to answer her but to hear, somewhere behind the moment, "the hall door shutting": the sound of an earlier self leaving another bed, having "left money, spoken short," and retreated into "the well-kept monkery of its pride."
That phrase, "well-kept monkery," is one of the poem's sharpest. Monkery suggests renunciation, but here it is renunciation as vanity, a sealed-off life polished like a cell. The speaker's older habit was to take what the bed offered and leave before anything could be asked of him. What the poem tracks is whether he can behave differently now, and the answer is unsettling. He does stay. He lets his lips smile, lets his body "study / The ease of the bed." But the verbs are telling. He is studying, observing, receiving; he is rarely simply doing. When the woman's hand moves across him, it becomes "a shuttle in a pattern," weaving "documents of softness," as though tenderness were a text he is reading rather than a warmth he is inside. By the fifth stanza the cost is stated flatly: "I was not a person anymore." It is hard to tell whether this is bliss or erasure, and the poem seems to mean both.
The form reinforces this slipperiness. Dickey writes in loose, long lines of roughly ten or eleven syllables, with a rhyme scheme that keeps almost resolving. Words like "cutting," "shutting," "waiting," "begetting" and "sitting" return again and again at line-ends, and these participles give the poem a continuous, unfinished motion, an action that never settles into a completed fact. Other rhymes arrive slightly off or at a distance ("dress" and "pride," "body" and "study"), so the reader senses a pattern without ever being allowed to relax into it. The effect resembles the speaker's own condition: close to intimacy, but never quite inside it.
The repeated word "cutting" is the poem's most interesting thread. It begins as a plain domestic remark, his hair "needed cutting," a small, affectionate observation. But it recurs, and by the end it has darkened. In the fifth stanza the bodies' confrontation is "strictly cutting / The edge of sight," and in the final stanza a part of him says, almost coldly, "your hair is in need of cutting," repeating her gentle phrase as an inner voice. The word carries both care and severance, grooming and cutting off. The same ambiguity hangs over "shutting," which opens and closes the poem. A door shutting is how his old self left; it is also, quietly, how the poem ends.
That ending is its quiet masterstroke. The speaker "felt the sun, the wind, the soft rain love me," a lovely, slightly too-perfect catalogue in which the whole world seems to applaud him. Yet he "did not hear, / Someplace away, the noise the door made shutting." The title lands here with real force. He is so absorbed in being approved of that he misses the sound he has been listening for all along, or perhaps he has trained himself to stop hearing it. Whether the door is the one he left through long ago or one he is closing again right now is left deliberately open, and the poem's uneasy honesty lies in that ambiguity.
What makes "Someplace Away" memorable is that it refuses both easy comfort and easy cynicism. It does not condemn the speaker for his defences, nor does it pretend that one gentle evening can dissolve them. Instead it shows how a person can be physically present and emotionally elsewhere, and how a moment of real kindness can coexist with the habit of leaving. The sensory detail is warm, but the poem's attention is fixed on the gap between the body in the room and the self that has slipped away.