Poetry Break: Falling

Falling

BY JAMES L. DICKEY

A 29-year-old stewardess fell ... to her
death tonight when she was swept
through an emergency door that sud-
denly sprang open ... The body ...
was found ... three hours after the
accident.                                             
                              —New York Times

The states when they black out and lie there rolling    when they turn

To something transcontinental    move by    drawing moonlight out of the great

One-sided stone hung off the starboard wingtip    some sleeper next to

An engine is groaning for coffee    and there is faintly coming in

Somewhere the vast beast-whistle of space. In the galley with its racks

Of trays    she rummages for a blanket    and moves in her slim tailored

Uniform to pin it over the cry at the top of the door. As though she blew

The door down with a silent blast from her lungs    frozen    she is black

Out finding herself    with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat

The undying cry of the void    falling    living    beginning to be something

That no one has ever been and lived through    screaming without enough air

Still neat    lipsticked    stockinged    girdled by regulation    her hat

Still on    her arms and legs in no world    and yet spaced also strangely

With utter placid rightness on thin air    taking her time    she holds it

In many places    and now, still thousands of feet from her death she seems

To slow    she develops interest    she turns in her maneuverable body

To watch it. She is hung high up in the overwhelming middle of things in her

Self    in low body-whistling wrapped intensely    in all her dark dance-weight

Coming down from a marvellous leap    with the delaying, dumfounding ease

Of a dream of being drawn    like endless moonlight to the harvest soil

Of a central state of one’s country    with a great gradual warmth coming

Over her    floating    finding more and more breath in what she has been using

For breath    as the levels become more human    seeing clouds placed honestly

Below her left and right    riding slowly toward them    she clasps it all

To her and can hang her hands and feet in it in peculiar ways    and

Her eyes opened wide by wind, can open her mouth as wide    wider and suck

All the heat from the cornfields    can go down on her back with a feeling

Of stupendous pillows stacked under her    and can turn    turn as to someone

In bed    smile, understood in darkness    can go away    slant    slide

Off tumbling    into the emblem of a bird with its wings half-spread

Or whirl madly on herself    in endless gymnastics in the growing warmth

Of wheatfields rising toward the harvest moon.    There is time to live

In superhuman health    seeing mortal unreachable lights far down seeing

An ultimate highway with one late priceless car probing it    arriving

In a square town    and off her starboard arm the glitter of water catches

The moon by its one shaken side    scaled, roaming silver    My God it is good

And evil    lying in one after another of all the positions for love

Making    dancing    sleeping    and now cloud wisps at her no

Raincoat    no matter    all small towns brokenly brighter from inside

Cloud    she walks over them like rain    bursts out to behold a Greyhound

Bus shooting light through its sides    it is the signal to go straight

Down like a glorious diver    then feet first    her skirt stripped beautifully

Up    her face in fear-scented cloths    her legs deliriously bare    then

Arms out    she slow-rolls over    steadies out    waits for something great

To take control of her    trembles near feathers    planes head-down

The quick movements of bird-necks turning her head    gold eyes the insight-

eyesight of owls blazing into the hencoops    a taste for chicken overwhelming

Her    the long-range vision of hawks enlarging all human lights of cars

Freight trains    looped bridges    enlarging the moon racing slowly

Through all the curves of a river    all the darks of the midwest blazing

From above. A rabbit in a bush turns white    the smothering chickens

Huddle    for over them there is still time for something to live

With the streaming half-idea of a long stoop    a hurtling    a fall

That is controlled    that plummets as it wills    turns gravity

Into a new condition, showing its other side like a moon    shining

New Powers    there is still time to live on a breath made of nothing

But the whole night    time for her to remember to arrange her skirt

Like a diagram of a bat    tightly it guides her    she has this flying-skin

Made of garments    and there are also those sky-divers on tv    sailing

In sunlight    smiling under their goggles    swapping batons back and forth

And He who jumped without a chute and was handed one by a diving

Buddy. She looks for her grinning companion    white teeth    nowhere

She is screaming    singing hymns    her thin human wings spread out

From her neat shoulders    the air beast-crooning to her    warbling

And she can no longer behold the huge partial form of the world    now

She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape    watching it lose

And gain    get back its houses and peoples    watching it bring up

Its local lights    single homes    lamps on barn roofs    if she fell

Into water she might live    like a diver    cleaving    perfect    plunge

Into another    heavy silver    unbreathable    slowing    saving

Element: there is water    there is time to perfect all the fine

Points of diving    feet together    toes pointed    hands shaped right

To insert her into water like a needle    to come out healthily dripping

And be handed a Coca-Cola    there they are    there are the waters

Of life    the moon packed and coiled in a reservoir    so let me begin

To plane across the night air of Kansas    opening my eyes superhumanly

Bright    to the damned moon    opening the natural wings of my jacket

By Don Loper    moving like a hunting owl toward the glitter of water

One cannot just fall    just tumble screaming all that time    one must use

It    she is now through with all    through all    clouds    damp    hair

Straightened    the last wisp of fog pulled apart on her face like wool revealing

New darks    new progressions of headlights along dirt roads from chaos

And night    a gradual warming    a new-made, inevitable world of one’s own

Country    a great stone of light in its waiting waters    hold    hold out

For water: who knows when what correct young woman must take up her body

And fly    and head for the moon-crazed inner eye of midwest imprisoned

Water    stored up for her for years    the arms of her jacket slipping

Air up her sleeves to go    all over her? What final things can be said

Of one who starts her sheerly in her body in the high middle of night

Air    to track down water like a rabbit where it lies like life itself

Off to the right in Kansas? She goes toward    the blazing-bare lake

Her skirts neat    her hands and face warmed more and more by the air

Rising from pastures of beans    and under her    under chenille bedspreads

The farm girls are feeling the goddess in them struggle and rise brooding

On the scratch-shining posts of the bed    dreaming of female signs

Of the moon    male blood like iron    of what is really said by the moan

Of airliners passing over them at dead of midwest midnight    passing

Over brush fires    burning out in silence on little hills    and will wake

To see the woman they should be    struggling on the rooftree to become

Stars: for her the ground is closer    water is nearer    she passes

It    then banks    turns    her sleeves fluttering differently as she rolls

Out to face the east, where the sun shall come up from wheatfields she must

Do something with water    fly to it    fall in it    drink it    rise

From it    but there is none left upon earth    the clouds have drunk it back

The plants have sucked it down    there are standing toward her only

The common fields of death    she comes back from flying to falling

Returns to a powerful cry    the silent scream with which she blew down

The coupled door of the airliner    nearly    nearly losing hold

Of what she has done    remembers    remembers the shape at the heart

Of cloud    fashionably swirling    remembers she still has time to die

Beyond explanation. Let her now take off her hat in summer air the contour

Of cornfields    and have enough time to kick off her one remaining

Shoe with the toes    of the other foot    to unhook her stockings

With calm fingers, noting how fatally easy it is to undress in midair

Near death    when the body will assume without effort any position

Except the one that will sustain it    enable it to rise    live

Not die    nine farms hover close    widen    eight of them separate, leaving

One in the middle    then the fields of that farm do the same    there is no

Way to back off    from her chosen ground    but she sheds the jacket

With its silver sad impotent wings    sheds the bat’s guiding tailpiece

Of her skirt    the lightning-charged clinging of her blouse    the intimate

Inner flying-garment of her slip in which she rides like the holy ghost

Of a virgin    sheds the long windsocks of her stockings    absurd

Brassiere    then feels the girdle required by regulations squirming

Off her: no longer monobuttocked    she feels the girdle flutter    shake

In her hand    and float    upward    her clothes rising off her ascending

Into cloud    and fights away from her head the last sharp dangerous shoe

Like a dumb bird    and now will drop in    soon    now will drop

In like this    the greatest thing that ever came to Kansas    down from all

Heights    all levels of American breath    layered in the lungs from the frail

Chill of space to the loam where extinction slumbers in corn tassels thickly

And breathes like rich farmers counting: will come along them after

Her last superhuman act    the last slow careful passing of her hands

All over her unharmed body    desired by every sleeper in his dream:

Boys finding for the first time their loins filled with heart’s blood

Widowed farmers whose hands float under light covers to find themselves

Arisen at sunrise    the splendid position of blood unearthly drawn

Toward clouds    all feel something    pass over them as she passes

Her palms over her long legs    her small breasts    and deeply between

Her thighs    her hair shot loose from all pins    streaming in the wind

Of her body    let her come openly    trying at the last second to land

On her back    This is it    this

                                                          All those who find her impressed

In the soft loam    gone down    driven well into the image of her body

The furrows for miles flowing in upon her where she lies very deep

In her mortal outline    in the earth as it is in cloud    can tell nothing

But that she is there    inexplicable    unquestionable    and remember

That something broke in them as well    and began to live and die more

When they walked for no reason into their fields to where the whole earth

Caught her    interrupted her maiden flight    told her how to lie she cannot

Turn    go away    cannot move    cannot slide off it and assume another

Position    no sky-diver with any grin could save her    hold her in his arms

Plummet with her    unfold above her his wedding silks    she can no longer

Mark the rain with whirling women that take the place of a dead wife

Or the goddess in Norwegian farm girls    or all the back-breaking whores

Of Wichita. All the known air above her is not giving up quite one

Breath    it is all gone    and yet not dead    not anywhere else

Quite    lying still in the field on her back    sensing the smells

Of incessant growth try to lift her    a little sight left in the corner

Of one eye    fading    seeing something wave    lies believing

That she could have made it    at the best part of her brief goddess

State    to water    gone in headfirst    come out smiling    invulnerable

Girl in a bathing-suit ad    but she is lying like a sunbather at the last

Of moonlight    half-buried in her impact on the earth    not far

From a railroad trestle    a water tank    she could see if she could

Raise her head from her modest hole    with her clothes beginning

To come down all over Kansas    into bushes    on the dewy sixth green

Of a golf course    one shoe    her girdle coming down fantastically

On a clothesline, where it belongs    her blouse on a lightning rod:

Lies in the fields    in this field    on her broken back as though on

A cloud she cannot drop through    while farmers sleepwalk without

Their women from houses    a walk like falling toward the far waters

Of life    in moonlight    toward the dreamed eternal meaning of their farms

Toward the flowering of the harvest in their hands    that tragic cost

Feels herself go    go toward    go outward    breathes at last fully

Not    and tries    less    once    tries    tries    ah, god—

James Dickey, “Falling” from The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945-1992.