At just under 2,200 words, James Dickey’s “Falling” occupies a special place in the poetic lexicon. It does so as a kind of fever dream that turns a dreadful event plucked from a news item of the day—a flight attendant sucked out of an airplane and plummeting to her death—into a celebration of the human imagination (Dickey’s) and the “freedom,” if you will indulge me that word given the circumstance it describes, to be found in truly, fully and deliciously letting go to death and extinction.
The poem requires only eight stanzas, hence most of them are quite long. That’s by way of preparing you, though my hunch is you will have no trouble falling right along with it.
Each stanza seems to gain speed and become more densely packed with the almost hallucinatory imagery Dickey conjures for his heroine, whom he immortalizes even as her own mortality flies up to meet her at the approximately 12...
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