I Wish I'd Written This

The Hospital Window

By James L. Dickey (1923-1997)

I have just come down from my father.

Higher and higher he lies

Above me in a blue light

Shed by a tinted window.

I drop through six white floors

And then step out onto pavement.

Still feeling my father ascend,

I start to cross the firm street,

My shoulder blades shining with all

The glass the huge building can raise.

Now I must turn round and face it,

And know his one pane from the others.

Each window possesses the sun

As though it burned there on a wick.

I wave, like a man catching fire.

All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash,

And, behind them, all the white rooms

They turn to the color of Heaven.

Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly,

Dozens of pale hands are waving

Back, from inside their flames.

Yet one pure pane among these

Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing.

I know that my father is there,

In the shape of his death still living.

The traffic increases around me

Like a madness called down on my head.

The horns blast at me like shotguns,

And drivers lean out, driven crazy—

But now my propped-up father

Lifts his arm out of stillness at last.

The light from the window strikes me

And I turn as blue as a soul,

As the moment when I was born.

I am not afraid for my father—

Look! He is grinning; he is not

Afraid for my life, either,

As the wild engines stand at my knees

Shredding their gears and roaring,

And I hold each car in its place

For miles, inciting its horn

To blow down the walls of the world

That the dying may float without fear

In the bold blue gaze of my father.

Slowly I move to the sidewalk

With my pin-tingling hand half dead

At the end of my bloodless arm.

I carry it off in amazement,

High, still higher, still waving,

My recognized face fully mortal,

Yet not; not at all, in the pale,

Drained, otherworldly, stricken,

Created hue of stained glass.
I have just come down from my father.

I have long loved this beautiful poem, because it reminds me of visiting my father in his nursing home when he was dying. The circumstances were different — no high floors to come down from, no waving through windows —but in some ways the feeling was the same, including the unspoken yet mutually conveyed knowledge that we were saying goodbye.

Regarded as a major American poet of his time, Dickey thought there was a poet buried in everyone, but that only some people felt the need to find and release that poetic spirit. After serving in the Air Force and then working in advertising, when he released his own poet he won awards and held prestigious positions — notably Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (later to become the office of Poet Laureate).

He was known for experimentation with language and syntax, and for contrasting our violent animal instincts with the supposedly safe veneer of civilisation. Some critics regarded him as deliberately eccentric. So it may seem that this poem about his father must be gentler and more accessible than most. But when you look at the others, it's not so. I think that by now poetry has been through so much experimentation, and addressed such confronting subjects, that Dickey's no longer strikes us as extreme. In fact later critics refer to his work as having 'intense clarity' or being 'deceptively simple'. You can judge for yourself by the pieces at PoemHunter.com or you can find his books at Amazon.

He was also a novelist, and the author of the best-selling Deliverance, which was made into a highly successful movie.

Any poem or photo used in ‘I Wish I’d Written This’ remains the property of the copyright holder (usually its author).