James Dickey - The Sheep Child lyrics

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 gra** 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 gra**y 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 gra** 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 gla**. Dead, I am most surely living In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives Them like wolves from the hound b**h 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.