This subject has been occupying my psyche for some months now and I believe bringing it into dialogue is long overdue. I’m pressed for time at the moment so for now I will start us off with a poem (oh no!) by James Dickey, the author of Deliverance, et al.

Power and Light…

only connect… — E.M. Forster

I may even be

A man, I tell my wife: all day I climb myself

Bowlegged up those damned poles    rooster-heeled in all

Kinds of weather    and what is there when I get

Home? Yes, woman trailing ground-oil

Like a snail, home is where I climb down,

And this is the house I pass through on my way

To power and light.

Going into the basement is slow, but the built-on smell of home

Beneath home gets better with age    the ground fermenting

And spilling through the barrel-cracks of plaster    the dark

Lying on the floor, ready for use    as I crack

The seal on the bottle    like I tell you it takes

A man to pour whiskey in the dark    and CLOSE THE DOOR between

The children and me.

The heads of nails drift deeper through their boards

And disappear. Years in the family dark have made me good

At this    nothing else is so good    pure fires of the Self

Rise crooning in lively blackness    and the silence around them,

Like the silence inside a mouth, squirms with colors,

The marvelous worms of the eye float out into the real

World    sunspots

Dancing as though existence were

One huge closed eye    and I feel the wires running

Like the life-force along the limed rafters    and all connections   

With poles    with the tarred naked belly-buckled black

Trees I hook to my heels     with the shrill phone calls leaping

Long distance    long distances through my hands    all connections

Even the one

With my wife, turn good    turn better than good    turn good

Not quite, but in the deep sway of underground    among the roots

That bend like branches    all things connect    and stream

Toward light and speech    tingle    rock like a powerline in wind,

Like a man working, drunk on pine-moves    the sun in the socket

Of his shoulder     and on his neck dancing like dice-dots

And I laugh

Like my own fate watching over me night and day    at home

Underground     or flung up on towers walking

Over mountains    my charged hair standing on end    crossing

The sickled, slaughtered alleys of timber

Where the lines loop and crackle on their gallows,

Far under the grass of my grave, I drink like a man

The night before

Resurrection Day. My watch glows with the time to rise

And shine. Never think I don’t know my profession

Will lift me: why, all over hell the lights burn in your eyes,

People are calling each other    weeping with a hundred thousand

Volts    making deals    pleading    laughing like fate,

Far off,  invulnerable    or with the right word pierced

To the heart

By wires I held, shooting off their ghostly mouths,

In my gloves. The house spins    I strap crampons to my shoes

To climb the basement stairs, sinking my heels in the tree-

Life of the boards. Thorns! Thorns! I am bursting

Into the kitchen, into the sad way-station

Of my home, holding a double handful of wires

Spitting like sparklers

On the Fourth of July. Woman, I know the secret of sitting

In light    of eating a limp piece of bread    under

The red-veined eyeball of a bulb. It is all in how you are

Grounded. To bread I can see, I say, as it disappears and agrees

With me    the dark is drunk    and I am a man

Who turns on. I am a man.

From The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945-1992 James Dickey.

Coming soon! “Hold the Chicken!”