“Woman and Beast in the Round of Their Need
Farm boys wild to couple With anything with soft-wooded trees With mounds of earth mounds Of pinestraw will keep themselves off Animals by legends of their own In the hay-tunnel dark And dung of barns.
In a museum in Atlanta Way back in a corner somewhere There’s this thing that’s only half Sheep like a wooly baby Pickled in alcohol. Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may Be saying saying
I am here, in my father’s house I who am half of your world, came deeply To my mother in the long grass Of the sweet pasture, where she stood like moonlight Listening for foxes. It was something like love From another world that seized her From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head Out of dew, without ever looking, her best Self to that great need.
Turned loose, she dipped her face Further into the chill of the earth, and in a sound Of sobbing of something stumbling Away, began, as she must do, to carry me. In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes Far more than human, I saw for a blazing moment The great grassy world from both sides, Man and beast in the round of their need. My hoof and my hand clasped each other And the hill wind stirred in my wool.
(A freely adapted translation of “The Sheep Child”, from James Dickey: The Selected Poems, Wesleyan University Press, 1998).”
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