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Sad, William Dickey, in English Clear filters

SadWilliam Dickey

Those Who Have Burned

Those who have burned themselves to the blood's limit, Have kindled their tree of flesh to its fierce end, Who appraise the guilty heartbeat, and within it Find nothing of warmth they can willingly defend . . . Those whose own hands pick at their sullen bodies To rid themselves of the increment of time, To slip from the icy bone its cloud of duties, Unsheathe it into the milky destructive lime . . . Those who, in the ripe garden, find no music But owl-call and the persuasion of the clay, The cold rock levels sloping silently deeper Out of the blood heat of the summer day . . . Commit them to themselves, with the most final And most generous will your hurt mind can control,
SadWilliam Dickey

Post-Therapy Room

Flatness is all. The sunfish lives in it, And lichens spread in an insistent plane, Saving their strength. No time dimension. Flat as a voice over the dictaphone. Wires, Mama, they do the thing with wires, As the sea-urchin spits his innards out. To be the thinnest fillet of Dover sole On the narrowest china plate, to be dead flat, Waiting for the steamroller's iron massage. Mama, with wires. They hang my shadow out, Opaque as Bible paper, and as thin. I am a lampshade made of human skin. They ironed my marrow to a pancaked cell, And that was me. I was alive and well. Only the sweetbreads of the past were gone, The little bumps of glands, concreted bones,
SadWilliam Dickey

Of Proportion

It is the kingdom of proportion, That being hunchback born I cannot enter. It is there that the fearless symmetries are danced. And it is news of propositions Concerning spheres and other equal bodies, That they, for their prosperity, act and publish. But I was marred in the firing, hurt in finish, The eye judging me neither simple nor whole, The hand afflicted by the eyesight's tremor, And though I call music into my partial soul, The strings slack at the hesitant invitation, The horns silence on the penultimate note, And those simple doors of perfect, unclouded crystal Combine to be closed to my attempts to enter, Return no echo from those who have gone beyond
SadWilliam Dickey

In the Appropriate Moment

In the appropriate moment, like a clock Striking the local hour's meridian, She in her hate for hours concluded in, And never a word to tell where she had been. Just as my hand, a clockwork, rose to strike, She launched to the telephone and was not there. Her voice had crumpled her along the wire; There was only a voiceless body in her chair. But when my body wired itself to talk, And the first syllable engaged my throat, She was paraded to be marching out. There was no time for us to talk about. In the appropriate moment, like a door, I closed that room. The clock stood struck and dumb. She was already someone else's home. And never a word to tell why she had come.
SadWilliam Dickey

Not This

What I intended was not this Grey absence when the heart declines Like a spent flower upon its stalk, The bent, the reprimanded head. What I intended was to say, Not in all things perfection lies, Nor are our human reasons pure— But you set out, as from some shore Obsidian-sharp, at once to sea, Where the most drowning waters are. It was not meant so finally. Meant as a thesis, not yet proved, A speculation, hardly said, The merest whisper of a voice— But at the sound you bowed your head. The universal darkness fell
SadWilliam Dickey

Someplace Away

And then she put her hand lightly alongside The nape of my neck, where the hair needed cutting. "You are a true light in my wilderness," She said, and, "I am grieved at our not meeting When we were young." I heard the hall door shutting Where an earlier me had risen and hurried to dress, Left money, spoken short, and was retreating Into the well-kept monkery of its pride. She soothed my hair, saying, but this wants cutting. My hair was tired, as tired as my narrow body, Thin with the exercise of staying itself. I let my lips smile, I let my thin flanks study The ease of the bed, how the yellow room was ready Amply and insistently to give itself, How she smiled in it, her smile as yet unsteady,

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