A View of Fujiyama after the War
Wind, and all the midges in the air,
On wings you cannot see, awake
Where they must have been sleeping in flight.
I breathe, and twenty miles away
Snow streams from the mountain top
And all other mountains are nothing.
The ground of the enemy's country
Shakes; my bones settle back where they stand.
JAMES DICKEY
Through the bloom of gnats in the sun,
Shaken less than my heart by the tremor,
The blossom of a cherry-tree appears.
The mountain returns my last breath,
And my hair blows, weightless as snow.
When it is still, when it is as still as this,
It could be a country where no one
Ever has died but of love.
I take the snow's breath and I speak it.
What I say has the form of a flame
Going all through the gnats like their spirit,
And for a swarming moment they become,
Almost, my own drunk face in the air
Against the one mountain in heaven.
It is better to wait here quietly,
Not for my face to take flight,
But for someone to come from the dead
Other side of the war to this place:
Who thinks of this ground as his home,
Who thinks no one else can be here,
And that no one can see him pass
His hand through a visage of insects,
His hand through the cone of the mountain
To pluck the flower. But will he feel
His sobbing be dug like a well-spring
Or a deep water grow from his lids
To light, and break up the mountain
Which sends his last breath from its summit
As it dances together again?
Can he know that to live at the heart
Of his saved, shaken life, is to stand
Overcome by the enemy's peace?
Structure
41 lines · 11 stanzas