Coming into Ellijay on the green
Idling freeway of the broad river
From the hill farms and pine woods,
We saw first the little stores
That backed down the red clay banks,
The blue flash of bottleglass
And the rippled tin heat-haze of sheds
Where country mechanics were frying.
A poultry-processing plant
Smoked in the late morning air;
The bridge we rode under clattered
As we wound back out into fields.
But the water that held us had changed;
The town had slowed it and used it;
The wind had died in the tool-sheds.
When we looked overboard, we knew.
Each thing was mistakenly feathered,
Muffled thickly in cast-off whiteness:
Each log was bedraggled in plumage
And accepting more feathers from water;
Each boulder under the green
Was becoming a lewd, setting hen
Moultingly under us brooding
In the sick, buried wind of the river,
Wavering, dying, increasing
From the plucked refuse of the plant,
And beside us uselessly floated
Following, dipping, returning,
Turning frankly around to eye us,
To eye something else, to eye
Us again—a skinned chicken head,
Its gaze unperturbed and abiding.
All morning we floated on feathers
Among the drawn heads which appeared
Everywhere, from under the logs
Of feathers, from upstream behind us,
Lounging back to us from ahead,
Until we believed ourselves doomed
And the planet corrupted forever,
With stones turned to pullets, not struggling
But into more monstrousness shed,
Our canoe trailing more and more feathers
And the eye of the devil upon us
Closing drunkenly in from all sides,
And could have been on the Styx
In the blaze of noon, till we felt
The quickening pulse of the rapids
And entered upon it like men
Who sense that the world can be cleansed
Among rocks pallid only with water,
And plunged there like the unborn
Who see earthly streams without taint
Flow beneath them, while their wing-feathers
Slough off behind them in Heaven
As they dress in the blinding clothes
Of nakedness for their fall.
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