[507] The Sheep-Child

Farm boys wild to couple
With anything         with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earth         mounds
Of pine straw         will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:
In the hay-tunnel dark
And dung of barns, they will
Say         I have heard tell

That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There's this thing that's only half
Sheep         like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol         because
Those things can't live         his eyes
Are open         but you can't stand to look
I heard from somebody who ...

But this is now almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The sheep are safe in the west hill
Pasture         but we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?
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 west 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 Iifting her head
     Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
     Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face
     Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound
     Of sobbing         of something stumbling
     Away, began, as she must do,
     To carry me. I woke, dying,

     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,
     And the hill wind stirred in my wool,
     My hoof and my hand clasped each other,
     I ate my one meal
     Of milk, and died
     Staring. From dark grass I came straight

     To my father's house, whose dust
     Whirls up in the halls for no reason
     When no one comes         piling deep in a hellish mild corner,
     And, through my immortal waters,
     I meet the sun's grains eye
     To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.
     Dead, I am most surely living
     In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives
     Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf
     And from the chaste ewe in the wind.
     They go into woods         into bean fields         they go
     Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,
     They groan         they wait         they suffer
     Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.

	-- James Dickey