As he moves the mine detector A few inches over the ground, Making it vitally float Among the ferns and weeds, I come into this war Slowly, with my one brother, Watching his face grow deep Between the earphones, For I can tell If we enter the buried battle Of Nimblewill Only by his expression. Softly he wanders, parting The grass with a dreaming hand. No dead cry yet takes root In his clapped ears Or can be seen in his smile. But underfoot I feel The dead regroup, The burst metals all in place, The battle lines be drawn Anew to include us In Nimblewill, And I carry the shovel and pick More as if they were Bright weapons that I bore. A bird's cry breaks In two, and into three parts. We cross the creek; the cry Shifts into another, Nearer, bird, and is Like the shout of a shadow— Lived-with, appallingly close— Or the soul, pronouncing "Nimblewill": Three tones; your being changes. We climb the bank; A faint light glows On my brother's mouth. I listen, as two birds fight For a single voice, but he Must be hearing the grave, In pieces, all singing To his clamped head, For he smiles as if He rose from the dead within Green Nimblewill And stood in his grandson's shape. No shot from the buried war Shall kill me now, For the dead have waited here A hundred years to create Only the look on the face Of my one brother, Who stands among them, offering A metal dish Afloat in the trembling weeds, With a long-buried light on his lips At Nimblewill And the dead outsinging two birds. I choke the handle Of the pick, and fall to my knees To dig wherever he points, To bring up mess tin or bullet, To go underground Still singing, myself, Without a sound, Like a man who renounces war, Or one who shall lift up the past, Not breathing "Father," At Nimblewill, But saying, "Fathers! Fathers!"
From The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945-1992 (Wesleyan University Press) by James Dickey. Copyright © 1992 by James Dickey. Used with permission of Wesleyan University Press.