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-<title>
-  The Project Gutenberg eBook of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, by D. H. Lawrence.
-</title>
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-<pre>
-
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, by D. H. Lawrence
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
-
-
-Title: Birds, Beasts and Flowers
-       Poems by D. H. Lawrence
-
-Author: D. H. Lawrence
-
-Release Date: September 21, 2019 [EBook #60337]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BIRDS, BEASTS AND FLOWERS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the Online
-Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
-file was produced from images generously made available
-by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
-<hr class="full" />
-
-<p class="c">
-<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="310" height="500" alt="" />
-</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_1" id="page_1">{1}</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="c"><b><big>BIRDS, BEASTS AND<br />
-FLOWERS</big></b>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_2" id="page_2">{2}</a></span>&nbsp;
-<br /><br />
-
-<i>By the same Author</i><br /><br />
-The Lost Girl<br />
-Women in Love<br />
-Aaron’s Rod<br />
-The Ladybird<br />
-Kangaroo<br />
-<br />
-Sea and Sardinia<br />
-<br />
-New Poems<br />
-<br />
-Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious<br />
-Fantasia of the Unconscious<br />
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_3" id="page_3">{3}</a></span></p>
-
-<h1>
-BIRDS, BEASTS<br />
-AND FLOWERS</h1>
-
-<p class="c"><big>P O E M S<br />
-BY<br />
-D. H. LAWRENCE</big><br />
-<br /><br />
-LONDON<br />
-MARTIN SECKER<br />
-NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET<br />
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_4" id="page_4">{4}</a></span>ADELPHI<br />
-<br /><small>
-Printed in Great Britain<br />
-by The Riverside Press Limited<br />
-Edinburgh<br /></small>
-<br /><br />
-LONDON: MARTIN SECKER (LTD.) 1923<br />
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_5" id="page_5">{5}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><span class="smcap">Some</span> of these poems have<br />
-appeared in <i>Poetry</i>, <i>The<br />
-Dial</i>, <i>The New
-Republic</i>,<br />
-<i>The Bookman</i>, <i>The English<br />Review</i>.</div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_7" id="page_7">{7}</a></span></p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_6" id="page_6">{6}</a></span></p>
-
-<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
-
-<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="">
-
-<tr><th colspan="2"><a href="#FRUITS">FRUITS:</a></th></tr>
-
-<tr><td></td><td class="rt"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#POMEGRANATE">Pomegranate</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_11">11</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#PEACH">Peach</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_13">13</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#MEDLARS_AND_SORB-APPLES">Medlars and Sorb-Apples</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_15">15</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#FIGS">Figs</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_18">18</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#GRAPES">Grapes</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_22">22</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#THE_REVOLUTIONARY">The Revolutionary</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_25">25</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#THE_EVENING_LAND">The Evening Land</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_28">28</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#PEACE">Peace</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_33">33</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><th colspan="2"><a href="#TREES">TREES:</a></th></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#CYPRESSES">Cypresses</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_37">37</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#BARE_FIG-TREES">Bare Fig-Trees</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_41">41</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#BARE_ALMOND-TREES">Bare Almond-Trees</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_44">44</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#TROPIC">Tropic</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_46">46</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#SOUTHERN_NIGHT">Southern Night</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_47">47</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><th colspan="2"><a href="#FLOWERS">FLOWERS:</a></th></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#ALMOND_BLOSSOM">Almond Blossom</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_51">51</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#PURPLE_ANEMONES">Purple Anemones</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_56">56</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#SICILIAN_CYCLAMENS">Sicilian Cyclamens</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_60">60</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#HIBISCUS_AND_SALVIA_FLOWERS">Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_63">63</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><th colspan="2"><a href="#THE_EVANGELISTIC_BEASTS">THE EVANGELISTIC BEASTS:</a></th></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#ST_MATTHEW">St Matthew</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_73">73</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#ST_MARK">St Mark</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_78">78</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#ST_LUKE">St Luke</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_81">81</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#ST_JOHN">St John</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_84">84</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><th colspan="2"><a href="#CREATURES">CREATURES:</a></th></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#THE_MOSQUITO">Mosquito</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_89">89</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#FISH">Fish</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_93">93</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#BAT">Bat</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_100">100</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#MAN_AND_BAT">Man and Bat</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_103">103</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><th colspan="2"><a href="#REPTILES">REPTILES:</a></th></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#SNAKE">Snake</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_113">113</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#BABY_TORTOISE">Baby Tortoise</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_117">117</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#TORTOISE_SHELL">Tortoise Shell</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_121">121</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#TORTOISE_FAMILY_CONNECTIONS">Tortoise Family Connections</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_124">124</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#LUI_ET_ELLE">Lui et Elle</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_127">127</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#TORTOISE_GALLANTRY">Tortoise Gallantry</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_132">132</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#TORTOISE_SHOUT">Tortoise Shout</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_134">134</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><th colspan="2"><a href="#BIRDS">BIRDS:</a></th></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#TURKEY-COCK">Turkey-Cock</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_141">141</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#HUMMING-BIRD">Humming-Bird</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_146">146</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#EAGLE_IN_NEW_MEXICO">Eagle in New Mexico</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_147">147</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#THE_BLUE_JAY">Blue Jay</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_150">150</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><th colspan="2"><a href="#ANIMALS">ANIMALS:</a></th></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#ASS">Ass</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_155">155</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#HE-GOAT">He-Goat</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_160">160</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#SHE-GOAT">She-Goat</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_165">165</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#ELEPHANT">Elephant</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_169">169</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#KANGAROO">Kangaroo</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_176">176</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#BIBBLES">Bibbles</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_179">179</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#MOUNTAIN_LION">Mountain Lion</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_187">187</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#THE_RED_WOLF">The Red Wolf</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_190">190</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><th colspan="2"><a href="#GHOSTS">GHOSTS:</a></th></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#MEN_IN_NEW_MEXICO">Men in New Mexico</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_197">197</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#AUTUMN_AT_TAOS">Autumn at Taos</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_199">199</a></td></tr>
-<tr><td class="indd" valign="top"><a href="#SPIRITS_SUMMONED_WEST">Spirits summoned West</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_201">201</a></td></tr>
-
-<tr><td class="smcap"><a href="#THE_AMERICAN_EAGLE">The American Eagle</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_205">205</a></td></tr>
-</table>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_9" id="page_9">{9}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_10" id="page_10">{10}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_11" id="page_11">{11}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<h2><a name="FRUITS" id="FRUITS"></a>FRUITS</h2>
-
-<h3><a name="POMEGRANATE" id="POMEGRANATE"></a>POMEGRANATE</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">You</span> tell me I am wrong.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I am not wrong.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek women,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate-trees in flower,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Oh so red, and such a lot of them.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Whereas at Venice<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Abhorrent, green, slippery city<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the dense foliage of the inner garden<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Pomegranates like bright green stone,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And barbed, barbed with a crown.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Oh, crown of spiked green metal<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Actually growing!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Now in Tuscany,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Pomegranates to warm your hands at;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Over the left eyebrow.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And, if you dare, the fissure!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Do you prefer to look on the plain side?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_12" id="page_12">{12}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">For all that, the setting suns are open.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The end cracks open with the beginning:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No glittering, compact drops of dawn?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>San Gervasio in Tuscany.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_13" id="page_13">{13}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="PEACH" id="PEACH"></a>PEACH</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Would</span> you like to throw a stone at me?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Here, take all that’s left of my peach.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Blood-red, deep;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Heaven knows how it came to pass.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Somebody’s pound of flesh rendered up.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Wrinkled with secrets<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And hard with the intention to keep them.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Why, from silvery peach-bloom,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From that shallow-silvery wine-glass on a short stem<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">This rolling, dropping, heavy globule?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I am thinking, of course, of the peach before I ate it.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Why so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Why hanging with such inordinate weight?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Why so indented?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Why the groove?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Why the lovely, bivalve roundnesses?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Why the ripple down the sphere?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Why the suggestion of incision?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Why was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It would have been if man had made it.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Though I’ve eaten it now.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_14" id="page_14">{14}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But it wasn’t round and finished like a billiard ball.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And because I say so, you would like to throw something at me.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Here, you can have my peach stone.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>San Gervasio.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_15" id="page_15">{15}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="MEDLARS_AND_SORB-APPLES" id="MEDLARS_AND_SORB-APPLES"></a>MEDLARS AND SORB-APPLES</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">I love</span> you, rotten,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Delicious rottenness.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I love to suck you out from your skins<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So brown and soft and coming suave,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So morbid, as the Italians say.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Stream within stream.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or vulgar Marsala.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Soon in the pussy-foot West.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What is it?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What is it, in the grape turning raisin,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the medlar, in the sorb-apple,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Wineskins of brown morbidity,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Autumnal excrementa;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What is it that reminds us of white gods?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Strangely, half-sinisterly flesh-fragrant<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As if with sweat,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And drenched with mystery.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_16" id="page_16">{16}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Orphic, delicate<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dionysos of the Underworld.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">A kiss, and a vivid spasm of farewell, a moment’s orgasm of rupture,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A new gasp of further isolation,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The fibres of the heart parting one after the other<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly embodied<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a flame blown whiter and whiter<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In a deeper and deeper darkness<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The distilled essence of hell.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The exquisite odour of leave-taking.<br /></span>
-<span class="i3"><i>Jamque vale!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Each soul departing with its own isolation,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Strangest of all strange companions,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And best.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_17" id="page_17">{17}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Medlars, sorb-apples<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">More than sweet<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Flux of autumn<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sucked out of your empty bladders<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And sipped down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add its music to yours,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the <i>ego sum</i> of Dionysos<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The <i>sono io</i> of perfect drunkenness<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Intoxication of final loneliness.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>San Gervasio.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_18" id="page_18">{18}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="FIGS" id="FIGS"></a>FIGS</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">The</span> proper way to eat a fig, in society,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Then you throw away the skin<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">After you have taken off the blossom with your lips.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But the vulgar way<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Every fruit has its secret.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The fig is a very secretive fruit.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And it seems male.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig-fruit:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The fissure, the yoni,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Involved,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Inturned,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And but one orifice.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_19" id="page_19">{19}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Symbols.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">It was always a secret.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That’s how it should be, the female should always be secret.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Silver-pink peach, Venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Openly pledging heaven:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Here’s to the thorn in flower! Here is to Utterance!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The brave, adventurous rosaceæ.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t taste it;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilisation, and fruiting<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_20" id="page_20">{20}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Till it’s finished, and you’re over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Till the drop of ripeness exudes,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the year is over.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the fig is finished, the year is over.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">That’s how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">That’s how women die too.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The year is fallen over-ripe,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The year of our women.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The secret is laid bare.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And rottenness soon sets in.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">When Eve once knew <i>in her mind</i> that she was naked<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the man.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">She’d been naked all her days before,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn’t had the fact on her mind.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_21" id="page_21">{21}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">She got the fact on her mind, and quickly sewed fig-leaves.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And women have been sewing ever since.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And they won’t let us forget it.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Now, the secret<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That laugh at the Lord’s indignation.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>What then, good Lord!</i> cry the women.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>We have kept our secret long enough.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>We are a ripe fig.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Let us burst into affirmation.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They forget, ripe figs won’t keep.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Ripe figs won’t keep.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside, of the south.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Ripe figs won’t keep, won’t keep in any clime.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What then, when women the world over have all bursten into affirmation?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And bursten figs won’t keep?<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>San Gervasio.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_22" id="page_22">{22}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="GRAPES" id="GRAPES"></a>GRAPES</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">So</span> many fruits come from roses<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From the rose of all roses<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From the unfolded rose<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Rose of all the world.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Admit that apples and strawberries and peaches and pears and blackberries<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Are all Rosaceæ,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Issue of the explicit rose,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The open-countenanced, skyward-smiling rose.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What then of the vine?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Oh, what of the tendrilled vine?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Ours is the universe of the unfolded rose,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The explicit,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The candid revelation.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But long ago, oh, long ago<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Before the rose began to simper supreme,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Before the rose of all roses, rose of all the world, was even in bud,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Before the glaciers were gathered up in a bunch out of the unsettled seas and winds,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or else before they had been let down again, in Noah’s flood,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">There was another world, a dusky, flowerless, tendrilled world<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And creatures webbed and marshy,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_23" id="page_23">{23}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And on the margin, men soft-footed and pristine,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Still, and sensitive, and active,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Audile, tactile sensitiveness as of a tendril which orientates and reaches out,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Reaching out and grasping by an instinct more delicate than the moon’s as she feels for the tides.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Of which world, the vine was the invisible rose,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Before petals spread, before colour made its disturbance, before eyes saw too much.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">In a green, muddy, web-foot, unutterably songless world<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The vine was rose of all roses.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">There were no poppies or carnations,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hardly a greenish lily, watery faint.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Green, dim, invisible flourishing of vines<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Royally gesticulate.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Look now even now, how it keeps its power of invisibility<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Look how black, how blue-black, how globed in Egyptian darkness<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dropping among his leaves, hangs the dark grape!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">See him there, the swart, so palpably invisible:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whom shall we ask about him?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The negro might know a little.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">When the vine was rose, Gods were dark-skinned.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Bacchus is a dream’s dream.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Once God was all negroid, as now he is fair.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But it’s so long ago, the ancient Bushman has forgotten more utterly than we, who have never known.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_24" id="page_24">{24}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">For we are on the brink of re-remembrance.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which, I suppose, is why America has gone dry.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Our pale day is sinking into twilight,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And if we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Out of the imminent night.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Nay, we find ourselves crossing the fern-scented frontiers<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of the world before the floods, where man was dark and evasive<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the tiny vine-flower rose of all roses, perfumed,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And all in naked communion communicating as now our clothed vision can never communicate.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Vistas, down dark avenues<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As we sip the wine.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The grape is swart, the avenues dusky and tendrilled, subtly prehensile,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But we, as we start awake, clutch at our vistas democratic, boulevards, tram-cars, policemen.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Give us our own back<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Let us go to the soda-fountain, to get sober.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Soberness, sobriety.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It is like the agonised perverseness of a child heavy with sleep, yet fighting, fighting to keep awake;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Soberness, sobriety, with heavy eyes propped open.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Dusky are the avenues of wine,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And we must cross the frontiers, though we will not,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of the lost, fern-scented world:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Take the fern-seed on our lips,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Close the eyes, and go<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Down the tendrilled avenues of wine and the otherworld.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>San Gervasio.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_25" id="page_25">{25}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h2><a name="THE_REVOLUTIONARY" id="THE_REVOLUTIONARY"></a>THE REVOLUTIONARY</h2>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Look</span> at them standing there in authority<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The pale-faces,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As if it could have any effect any more.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Pale-face authority,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Caryatids,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Pillars of white bronze standing rigid, lest the skies fall.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What a job they’ve got to keep it up.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Their poor, idealist foreheads naked capitals<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To the entablature of clouded heaven.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">When the skies are going to fall, fall they will<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In a great chute and rush of débâcle downwards.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Oh and I wish the high and super-gothic heavens would come down now,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The heavens above, that we yearn to and aspire to.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I do not yearn, nor aspire, for I am a blind Samson.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And what is daylight to me that I should look skyward?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Only I grope among you, pale-faces, caryatids, as among a forest of pillars that hold up the dome of high ideal heaven<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which is my prison,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And all these human pillars of loftiness, going stiff, metallic-stunned with the weight of their responsibility<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I stumble against them.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Stumbling-blocks, painful ones.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_26" id="page_26">{26}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">To keep on holding up this ideal civilisation<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Must be excruciating: unless you stiffen into metal, when it is easier to stand stock rigid than to move.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">This is why I tug at them, individually, with my arm round their waist<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The human pillars.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They are not stronger than I am, blind Samson.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The house sways.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I shall be so glad when it comes down.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I am so tired of the limitations of their Infinite.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I am so sick of the pretensions of the Spirit.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I am so weary of pale-face importance.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Am I not blind, at the round-turning mill?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Then why should I fear their pale faces?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or love the effulgence of their holy light,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The sun of their righteousness?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">To me, all faces are dark,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All lips are dusky and valved.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Save your lips, O pale-faces,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which are slips of metal,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like slits in an automatic-machine, you columns of give-and-take.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">To me, the earth rolls ponderously, superbly<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Coming my way without forethought or afterthought.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To me, men’s footfalls fall with a dull, soft rumble, ominous and lovely,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Coming my way.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_27" id="page_27">{27}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But not your foot-falls, pale-faces,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They are a clicketing of bits of disjointed metal<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Working in motion.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">To me, men are palpable, invisible nearnesses in the dark<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sending out magnetic vibrations of warning, pitch-dark throbs of invitation.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But you, pale-faces,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You are painful, harsh-surfaced pillars that give off nothing except rigidity,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I jut against you if I try to move, for you are everywhere, and I am blind,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sightless among all your visuality,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You staring caryatids.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">See if I don’t bring you down, and all your high opinion<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And all your ponderous roofed-in erection of right and wrong<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your particular heavens,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With a smash.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">See if your skies aren’t falling!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And my head, at least, is thick enough to stand it, the smash.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">See if I don’t move under a dark and nude, vast heaven<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">When your world is in ruins, under your fallen skies.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Caryatids, pale-faces.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">See if I am not Lord of the dark and moving hosts<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Before I die.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Florence.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_28" id="page_28">{28}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h2><a name="THE_EVENING_LAND" id="THE_EVENING_LAND"></a>THE EVENING LAND</h2>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Oh</span> America<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The sun sets in you.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Are you the grave of our day?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Shall I come to you, the open tomb of my race?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I would come, if I felt my hour had struck.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I would rather you came to me.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">For that matter<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Mahomet never went to any mountain<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Save it had first approached him and cajoled his soul.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You have cajoled the souls of millions of us<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">America,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Why won’t you cajole my soul?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I wish you would.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I confess I am afraid of you.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The catastrophe of your exaggerate love,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You who never find yourself in love<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But only lose yourself further, decomposing.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You who never recover from out of the orgasm of loving<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your pristine, isolate integrity, lost æons ago.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your singleness within the universe.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_29" id="page_29">{29}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You who in loving break down<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And break further and further down<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your bounds of isolation,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But who never rise, resurrected, from this grave of mingling,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In a new proud singleness, America.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Your more-than-European idealism,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a be-aureoled bleached skeleton hovering<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Its cage-ribs in the social heaven, beneficent.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And then your single resurrection<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Into machine-uprisen perfect man.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Even the winged skeleton of your bleached ideal<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is not so frightening as that clean smooth<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Automaton of your uprisen self,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Machine American.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Do you wonder that I am afraid to come<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And answer the first machine-cut question from the lips of your iron men?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Put the first cents into metallic fingers of your officers<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And sit beside the steel-straight arms of your fair women<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">American?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">This may be a withering tree, this Europe,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But here, even a customs-official is still vulnerable.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I am so terrified, America,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of the iron click of your human contact.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And after this<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The winding-sheet of your self-less ideal love.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Boundless love<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a poison gas.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_30" id="page_30">{30}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Does no one realise that love should be intense, individual,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Not boundless.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">This boundless love is like the bad smell<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of something gone wrong in the middle.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All this philanthropy and benevolence on other people’s behalf<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Just a bad smell.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Yet, America,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your elvishness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your New England uncanniness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your western brutal faery quality.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">My soul is half-cajoled, half-cajoled.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Something in you which carries me beyond<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yankee, Yankee,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What we call human.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Carries me where I want to be carried ...<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or don’t I?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What does it matter<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What we call human, and what we don’t call human?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The rose would smell as sweet.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And to be limited by a mere word is to be less than a hopping flea, which hops over such an obstruction at first jump.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Your horrible, skeleton, aureoled ideal,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your weird bright motor-productive mechanism,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Two spectres.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_31" id="page_31">{31}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But moreover<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A dark, unfathomed will, that is not un-Jewish;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A set, stoic endurance, non-European;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">An ultimate desperateness, un-African;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A deliberate generosity, non-Oriental.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The strange, unaccustomed geste of your demonish New World nature<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Glimpsed now and then.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Nobody knows you.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You don’t know yourself.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I, who am half in love with you,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What am I in love with?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">My own imaginings?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Say it is not so.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Say, through the branches<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">America, America<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of all your machines,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Say, in the deep sockets of your idealistic skull,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dark, aboriginal eyes<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Stoic, able to wait through ages<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Glancing.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Say, in the sound of all your machines<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And white words, white-wash American,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Deep pulsing of a strange heart<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">New throb, like a stirring under the false dawn that precedes the real.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_32" id="page_32">{32}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Nascent American<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Demonish, lurking among the undergrowth<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of many-stemmed machines and chimneys that smoke like pine-trees.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Dark, elvish,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Modern, unissued, uncanny America,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your nascent demon people<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Lurking among the deeps of your industrial thicket<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Allure me till I am beside myself,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A nympholepht.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">“These States!” as Whitman said,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whatever he meant.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Baden-Baden.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_33" id="page_33">{33}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h2><a name="PEACE" id="PEACE"></a>PEACE</h2>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Peace</span> is written on the doorstep<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In lava.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Peace, black peace congealed.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">My heart will know no peace<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Till the hill bursts.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Brilliant, intolerable lava<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Brilliant as a powerful burning-glass<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Walking like a royal snake down the mountain towards the sea.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Forests, cities, bridges<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Gone again in the bright trail of lava.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Naxos thousands of feet below the olive-roots,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And now the olive leaves thousands of feet below the lava fire.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Peace congealed in black lava on the doorstep.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Within, white-hot lava, never at peace<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Till it burst forth blinding, withering the earth;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To set again into rock<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Grey-black rock.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Call it Peace?<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taormina.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_35" id="page_35">{35}</a></span><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_34" id="page_34">{34}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_36" id="page_36">{36}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_37" id="page_37">{37}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<h2><a name="TREES" id="TREES"></a>TREES</h2>
-
-<h3><a name="CYPRESSES" id="CYPRESSES"></a>CYPRESSES</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Tuscan</span> cypresses,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What is it?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Folded in like a dark thought<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">For which the language is lost,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Tuscan cypresses,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is there a great secret?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Are our words no good?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The undeliverable secret,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dead with a dead race and a dead speech, and yet<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Darkly monumental in you,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Etruscan cypresses.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Ah, how I admire your fidelity,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dark cypresses,<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Is it the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The long-nosed, sensitive-footed, subtly-smiling Etruscans,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who made so little noise outside the cypress groves?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Among the sinuous, flame-tall cypresses<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That swayed their length of darkness all around<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Etruscan-dusky, wavering men of old Etruria:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Naked except for fanciful long shoes,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Going with insidious, half-smiling quietness<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And some of Africa’s imperturbable sang-froid<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">About a forgotten business.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_38" id="page_38">{38}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What business, then?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Nay, tongues are dead, and words are hollow as hollow seed-pods,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Having shed their sound and finished all their echoing<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Etruscan syllables,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That had the telling.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Yet more I see you darkly concentrate,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Tuscan cypresses,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On one old thought:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On one old slim imperishable thought, while you remain<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Etruscan cypresses;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dusky, slim marrow-thought of slender, flickering men of Etruria,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whom Rome called vicious.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Vicious, dark cypresses:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Vicious, you supple, brooding, softly-swaying pillars of dark flame.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Monumental to a dead, dead race<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Embalmed in you!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Were they then vicious, the slender, tender-footed,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Long-nosed men of Etruria?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or was their way only evasive and different, dark, like cypress-trees in a wind?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They are dead, with all their vices,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And all that is left<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is the shadowy monomania of some cypresses<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And tombs.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_39" id="page_39">{39}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The smile, the subtle Etruscan smile still lurking<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Within the tombs,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Etruscan cypresses.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He laughs longest who laughs last;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Nay, Leonardo only bungled the pure Etruscan smile.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What would I not give<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To bring back the rare and orchid-like<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Evil-yclept Etruscan?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">For as to the evil<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">We have only Roman word for it,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which I, being a little weary of Roman virtue,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Don’t hang much weight on.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">For oh, I know, in the dust where we have buried<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The silenced races and all their abominations,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">There in the deeps<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That churn the frankincense and ooze the myrrh,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Cypress shadowy,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Such an aroma of lost human life!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They say the fit survive,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But I invoke the spirits of the lost.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Those that have not survived, the darkly lost,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To bring their meaning back into life again,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which they have taken away<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And wrapt inviolable in soft cypress-trees,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Etruscan cypresses.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_40" id="page_40">{40}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Evil, what is evil?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">There is only one evil, to deny life<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As Rome denied Etruria<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And mechanical America Montezuma still.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Fiesole.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_41" id="page_41">{41}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="BARE_FIG-TREES" id="BARE_FIG-TREES"></a>BARE FIG-TREES</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Fig-trees</span>, weird fig-trees<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Made of thick smooth silver,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Made of sweet, untarnished silver in the sea-southern air&mdash;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I say untarnished, but I mean opaque&mdash;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Thick, smooth-fleshed silver, dull only as human limbs are dull<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With the life-lustre,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Nude with the dim light of full, healthy life<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That is always half-dark,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And suave like passion-flower petals,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like passion-flowers,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With the half-secret gleam of a passion-flower hanging from the rock,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Great, complicated, nude fig-tree, stemless flower-mesh,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Flowerily naked in flesh, and giving off hues of life.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Rather like an octopus, but strange and sweet-myriad-limbed octopus;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a nude, like a rock-living, sweet-fleshed sea-anemone,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Flourishing from the rock in a mysterious arrogance.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Let me sit down beneath the many-branching candelabrum<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That lives upon this rock<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And laugh at Time, and laugh at dull Eternity,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And make a joke of stale Infinity,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Within the flesh-scent of this wicked tree,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That has kept so many secrets up its sleeve,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_42" id="page_42">{42}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And has been laughing through so many ages<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At man and his uncomfortablenesses,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And his attempt to assure himself that what is so is not so,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Up its sleeve.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Let me sit down beneath this many-branching candelabrum,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The Jewish seven-branched, tallow-stinking candlestick kicked over the cliff<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And all its tallow righteousness got rid of,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And let me notice it behave itself.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And watch it putting forth each time to heaven,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Each time straight to heaven,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With marvellous naked assurance each single twig<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Each one setting off straight to the sky<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As if it were the leader, the main-stem, the forerunner,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Intent to hold the candle of the sun upon its socket-tip,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It alone.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Every young twig<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No sooner issued sideways from the thigh of his predecessor<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Than off he starts without a qualm<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To hold the one and only lighted candle of the sun in his socket-tip.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He casually gives birth to another young bud from his thigh,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which at once sets off to be the one and only,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And hold the lighted candle of the sun.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Oh many-branching candelabrum, oh strange up-starting fig-tree,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Oh weird Demos, where every twig is the arch twig,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_43" id="page_43">{43}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Each imperiously over-equal to each, equality over-reaching itself<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like the snakes on Medusa’s head,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Oh naked fig-tree!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Still, no doubt every one of you can be the sun-socket as well as every other of you.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Demos, Demos, Demos!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Demon, too,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Wicked fig-tree, equality puzzle, with your self-conscious secret fruits.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taormina.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_44" id="page_44">{44}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="BARE_ALMOND-TREES" id="BARE_ALMOND-TREES"></a>BARE ALMOND-TREES</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Wet</span> almond-trees, in the rain,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like iron sticking grimly out of earth;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Black almond trunks, in the rain,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like iron implements twisted, hideous, out of the earth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Out of the deep, soft fledge of Sicilian winter-green,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Earth-grass uneatable,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Almond trunks curving blackly, iron-dark, climbing the slopes.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Almond-tree, beneath the terrace rail,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Black, rusted, iron trunk,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You have welded your thin stems finer,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like steel, like sensitive steel in the air,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Grey, lavender, sensitive steel, curving thinly and brittly up in a parabola.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What are you doing in the December rain?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Have you a strange electric sensitiveness in your steel tips?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Do you feel the air for electric influences<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like some strange magnetic apparatus?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Do you take in messages, in some strange code,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From heaven’s wolfish, wandering electricity, that prowls so constantly round Etna?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Do you take the whisper of sulphur from the air?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Do you hear the chemical accents of the sun?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Do you telephone the roar of the waters over the earth?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And from all this, do you make calculations?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_45" id="page_45">{45}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Sicily, December’s Sicily in a mass of rain<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With iron branching blackly, rusted like old, twisted implements<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And brandishing and stooping over earth’s wintry fledge, climbing the slopes<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of uneatable soft green!<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taormina.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_46" id="page_46">{46}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h2><a name="TROPIC" id="TROPIC"></a>TROPIC</h2>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Sun</span>, dark sun<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sun of black void heat<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sun of the torrid mid-day’s horrific darkness.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Behold my hair twisting and going black.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Behold my eyes turn tawny yellow<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Negroid;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">See the milk of northern spume<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Coagulating and going black in my veins<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Aromatic as frankincense.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Columns dark and soft<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sunblack men<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Soft shafts, sunbreathing mouths<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Eyes of yellow, golden sand<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As frictional, as perilous, explosive as brimstone.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Rock, waves of dark heat;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Waves of dark heat, rock, sway upwards<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Waver perpendicular.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What is the horizontal rolling of water<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Compared to the flood of black heat that rolls upward past my eyes?<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taormina.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_47" id="page_47">{47}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h2><a name="SOUTHERN_NIGHT" id="SOUTHERN_NIGHT"></a>SOUTHERN NIGHT</h2>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Come</span> up, thou red thing.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Come up, and be called a moon.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The mosquitoes are biting to-night<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like memories.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Memories, northern memories,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Bitter-stinging white world that bore us<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Subsiding into this night.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Call it moonrise<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">This red anathema?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Rise, thou red thing,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Unfold slowly upwards, blood-dark;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Burst the night’s membrane of tranquil stars<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Finally.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Maculate<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The red Macula.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taormina.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_49" id="page_49">{49}</a></span><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_48" id="page_48">{48}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_50" id="page_50">{50}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_51" id="page_51">{51}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<h2><a name="FLOWERS" id="FLOWERS"></a>FLOWERS</h2>
-
-<h3><a name="ALMOND_BLOSSOM" id="ALMOND_BLOSSOM"></a>ALMOND BLOSSOM</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Even</span> iron can put forth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Even iron.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">This is the iron age,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But let us take heart<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Seeing iron break and bud,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The almond-tree,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">December’s bare iron hooks sticking out of earth.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The almond-tree,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That knows the deadliest poison, like a snake<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In supreme bitterness.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Upon the iron, and upon the steel,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Odd flakes as if of snow, odd bits of snow,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Odd crumbs of melting snow.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But you mistake, it is not from the sky;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From out the iron, and from out the steel,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Flying not down from heaven, but storming up,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Strange storming up from the dense under-earth<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Along the iron, to the living steel<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In rose-hot tips, and flakes of rose-pale snow<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Setting supreme annunciation to the world.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_52" id="page_52">{52}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Nay, what a heart of delicate super-faith,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Iron-breaking,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The rusty swords of almond-trees.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Trees suffer, like races, down the long ages.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They wander and are exiled, they live in exile through long ages<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like drawn blades never sheathed, hacked and gone black,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The alien trees in alien lands: and yet<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The heart of blossom,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The unquenchable heart of blossom!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Look at the many-cicatrised frail vine, none more scarred and frail,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yet see him fling himself abroad in fresh abandon<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From the small wound-stump.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Even the wilful, obstinate, gummy fig-tree<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Can be kept down, but he’ll burst like a polyp into prolixity.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And the almond-tree, in exile, in the iron age!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">This is the ancient southern earth whence the vases were baked, amphoras, craters, cantharus, œnochœ, and open-hearted cylix,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Bristling now with the iron of almond-trees<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Iron, but unforgotten,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Iron, dawn-hearted,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Ever-beating dawn-heart, enveloped in iron against the exile, against the ages.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_53" id="page_53">{53}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">See it come forth in blossom<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From the snow-remembering heart<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In long-nighted January,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the long dark nights of the evening star, and Sirius, and the Etna snow-wind through the long night.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Sweating his drops of blood through the long-nighted Gethsemane<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Into blossom, into pride, into honey-triumph, into most exquisite splendour.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Oh, give me the tree of life in blossom<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the Cross sprouting its superb and fearless flowers!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Something must be reassuring to the almond, in the evening star, and the snow-wind, and the long, long, nights,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Some memory of far, sun-gentler lands,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So that the faith in his heart smiles again<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And his blood ripples with that untellable delight of once-more-vindicated faith,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the Gethsemane blood at the iron pores unfolds, unfolds,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Pearls itself into tenderness of bud<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And in a great and sacred forthcoming steps forth, steps out in one stride<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A naked tree of blossom, like a bridegroom bathing in dew, divested of cover,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Frail-naked, utterly uncovered<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To the green night-baying of the dog-star, Etna’s snow-edged wind<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And January’s loud-seeming sun.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_54" id="page_54">{54}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Think of it, from the iron fastness<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Suddenly to dare to come out naked, in perfection of blossom, beyond the sword-rust.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Think, to stand there in full-unfolded nudity, smiling,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With all the snow-wind, and the sun-glare, and the dog-star baying epithalamion.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Oh, honey-bodied beautiful one,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Come forth from iron,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Red your heart is.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fragile-tender, fragile-tender life-body,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">More fearless than iron all the time,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And so much prouder, so disdainful of reluctances.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">In the distance like hoar-frost, like silvery ghosts communing on a green hill,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hoar-frost-like and mysterious.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">In the garden raying out<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With a body like spray, dawn-tender, and looking about<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With such insuperable, subtly-smiling assurance,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sword-blade-born.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Unpromised,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No bounds being set.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Flaked out and come unpromised,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The tree being life-divine,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fearing nothing, life-blissful at the core<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Within iron and earth.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_55" id="page_55">{55}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Knots of pink, fish-silvery<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In heaven, in blue, blue heaven,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Soundless, bliss-full, wide-rayed, honey-bodied,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Red at the core,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Red at the core,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Knotted in heaven upon the fine light.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Open,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Open,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Five times wide open,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Six times wide open,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And given, and perfect;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And red at the core with the last sore-heartedness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sore-hearted-looking.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Fontana Vecchia.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_56" id="page_56">{56}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="PURPLE_ANEMONES" id="PURPLE_ANEMONES"></a>PURPLE ANEMONES</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Who gave us flowers?</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Heaven? The white God?</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Nonsense!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Up out of hell,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From Hades;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Infernal Dis!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Jesus the god of flowers&mdash;&mdash;?</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Not he.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Or sun-bright Apollo, him so musical?</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Him neither.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Who then?</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Say who.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Say it&mdash;and it is Pluto,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dis,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The dark one,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Proserpine’s master.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Who contradicts&mdash;&mdash;?</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">When she broke forth from below,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Flowers came, hell-hounds on her heels.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dis, the dark, the jealous god, the husband,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Flower-sumptuous-blooded.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_57" id="page_57">{57}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Go then</i>, he said.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And in Sicily, on the meadows of Enna,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">She thought she had left him;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But opened around her purple anemones,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Caverns,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Little hells of colour, caves of darkness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hell, risen in pursuit of her; royal, sumptuous<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Pit-falls.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">All at her feet<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hell opening;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At her white ankles<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hell rearing its husband-splendid, serpent heads,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hell-purple, to get at her&mdash;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Why did he let her go?</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So he could track her down again, white victim.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Ah mastery!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hell’s husband-blossoms<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Out on earth again.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Look out, Persephone!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You, Madame Ceres, mind yourself, the enemy is upon you.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">About your feet spontaneous aconite,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hell-glamorous, and purple husband-tyranny<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Enveloping your late-enfranchised plains.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You thought your daughter had escaped?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No more stockings to darn for the flower-roots, down in hell?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But ah my dear!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_58" id="page_58">{58}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Aha, the stripe-cheeked whelps, whippet-slim crocuses,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>At ’em, boys, at ’em!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Ho golden-spaniel, sweet alert narcissus,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Smell ’em, smell ’em out!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Those two enfranchised women.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Somebody is coming!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Oho there!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Dark blue anemones!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hell is up!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hell on earth, and Dis within the depths!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Run, Persephone, he is after you already.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Why did he let her go?</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To track her down;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All the sport of summer and spring, and flowers snapping at her ankles and catching her by the hair!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Poor Persephone and her rights for women.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Husband-snared hell-queen,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>It is spring.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">It is spring,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And pomp of husband-strategy on earth.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Ceres, kiss your girl, you think you’ve got her back.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>The bit of husband-tilth she is,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Persephone!</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_59" id="page_59">{59}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Poor mothers-in-law!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They are always sold.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">It is spring.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taormina.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_60" id="page_60">{60}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="SICILIAN_CYCLAMENS" id="SICILIAN_CYCLAMENS"></a>SICILIAN CYCLAMENS</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">When</span> he pushed his bush of black hair off his brow:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">When she lifted her mop from her eyes, and screwed it in a knob behind<br /></span>
-<span class="i4">&mdash;O act of fearful temerity!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">When they felt their foreheads bare, naked to heaven, their eyes revealed:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">When they felt the light of heaven brandished like a knife at their defenceless eyes,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the sea like a blade at their face,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Mediterranean savages:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">When they came out, face-revealed, under heaven, from the shaggy undergrowth of their own hair<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">For the first time,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They saw tiny rose cyclamens between their toes, growing<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Where the slow toads sat brooding on the past.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Slow toads, and cyclamen leaves<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Stickily glistening with eternal shadow<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Keeping to earth.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Cyclamen leaves<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Toad-filmy, earth-iridescent<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Beautiful<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Frost-filigreed<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Spumed with mud<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Snail-nacreous<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Low down.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_61" id="page_61">{61}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The shaking aspect of the sea<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And man’s defenceless bare face<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And cyclamens putting their ears back.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Long, pensive, slim-muzzled greyhound buds<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dreamy, not yet present,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Drawn out of earth<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At his toes.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Dawn-rose<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sub-delighted, stone-engendered<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Cyclamens, young cyclamens<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Arching<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Waking, pricking their ears<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like delicate very-young greyhound bitches<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Half-yawning at the open, inexperienced<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Vista of day,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Folding back their soundless petalled ears.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Greyhound bitches<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sending their rosy muzzled pensive down,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And breathing soft, unwilling to wake to the new day<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yet sub-delighted.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Ah Mediterranean morning, when our world began!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Far-off Mediterranean mornings,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Pelasgic faces uncovered,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And unbudding cyclamens.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The hare suddenly goes uphill<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Laying back her long ears with unwinking bliss.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_62" id="page_62">{62}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And up the pallid, sea-blenched Mediterranean stone-slopes<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Rose cyclamen, ecstatic fore-runner!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Cyclamens, ruddy-muzzled cyclamens<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In little bunches like bunches of wild hares<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Muzzles together, ears-aprick<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whispering witchcraft<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like women at a well, the dawn-fountain.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Greece, and the world’s morning<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Where all the Parthenon marbles still fostered the roots of the cyclamen.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Violets<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Pagan, rosy-muzzled violets<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Autumnal<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dawn-pink,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dawn-pale<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Among squat toad-leaves sprinkling the unborn<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Erechtheion marbles.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taormina.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_63" id="page_63">{63}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="HIBISCUS_AND_SALVIA_FLOWERS" id="HIBISCUS_AND_SALVIA_FLOWERS"></a>HIBISCUS AND SALVIA FLOWERS</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Hark! Hark!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>The dogs do bark!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>It’s the socialists come to town,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>None in rags and none in tags,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Swaggering up and down.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Sunday morning,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And from the Sicilian townlets skirting Etna<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The socialists have gathered upon us, to look at us.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">How shall we know them when we see them?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">How shall we know them now they’ve come?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Not by their rags and not by their tags,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Nor by any distinctive gown;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The same unremarkable Sunday suit<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And hats cocked up and down.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Yet there they are, youths, loutishly<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Strolling in gangs and staring along the Corso<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With the gang-stare<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And a half-threatening envy<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At every <i>forestière</i>,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Every lordly tuppenny foreigner from the hotels, fattening on the exchange.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Hark! Hark!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>The dogs do bark!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>It’s the socialists in the town.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_64" id="page_64">{64}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Sans rags, sans tags,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sans beards, sans bags,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sans any distinction at all except loutish commonness.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">How do we know then, that they are they?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Bolshevists.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Leninists.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Communists.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Socialists.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">-Ists!-Ists!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Alas, salvia and hibiscus flowers.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Salvia and hibiscus flowers.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Listen again.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Salvia and hibiscus flowers.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is it not so?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Salvia and hibiscus flowers.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Hark! Hark!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>The dogs do bark!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Salvia and hibiscus flowers.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Who smeared their doors with blood?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who on their breasts<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Put salvias and hibiscus?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Rosy, rosy scarlet,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And flame-rage, golden-throated<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Bloom along the Corso on the living, perambulating bush.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Who said they might assume these blossoms?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What god did they consult?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_65" id="page_65">{65}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Rose-red, princess hibiscus, rolling her pointed Chinese petals!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Azalea and camellia, single peony<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And pomegranate bloom and scarlet mallow-flower<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And all the eastern, exquisite royal plants<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That noble blood has brought us down the ages!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Gently nurtured, frail and splendid<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hibiscus flower&mdash;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Alas, the Sunday coats of Sicilian bolshevists!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Pure blood, and noble blood, in the fine and rose-red veins;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Small, interspersed with jewels of white gold<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Frail-filigreed among the rest;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Rose of the oldest races of princesses, Polynesian<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hibiscus.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Eve, in her happy moments,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Put hibiscus in her hair,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Before she humbled herself, and knocked her knees with repentance.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Sicilian bolshevists,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With hibiscus flowers in the buttonholes of your Sunday suits,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Come now, speaking of rights, what right have you to this flower?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The exquisite and ageless aristocracy<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of a peerless soul,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Blessed are the pure in heart and the fathomless in bright pride;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The loveliness that knows <i>noblesse oblige</i>;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The native royalty of red hibiscus flowers;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_66" id="page_66">{66}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The exquisite assertion of new delicate life<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Risen from the roots:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is this how you’ll have it, red-decked socialists,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hibiscus-breasted?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">If it be so, I fly to join you,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And if it be not so, brutes to pull down hibiscus flowers!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Or salvia!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or dragon-mouthed salvia with gold throat of wrath!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Flame-flushed, enraged, splendid salvia,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Cock-crested, crowing your orange scarlet like a tocsin<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Along the Corso all this Sunday morning.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Is your wrath red as salvias,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You socialists?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You with your grudging, envious, furtive rage,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In Sunday suits and yellow boots along the Corso.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You look well with your salvia flowers, I must say.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Warrior-like, dawn-cock’s-comb flaring flower<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Shouting forth flame to set the world on fire,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The dust-heap of man’s filthy world on fire,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And burn it down, the glutted, stuffy world,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And feed the young new fields of life with ash,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With ash I say,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Bolshevists,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your ashes even, my friends,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Among much other ash.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">If there were salvia-savage bolshevists<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To burn the world back to manure-good ash,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Wouldn’t I stick the salvia in my coat!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But these themselves must burn, these louts!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_67" id="page_67">{67}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The dragon-faced,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The anger-reddened, golden-throated salvia<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With its long antennæ of rage put out<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Upon the frightened air.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Ugh, how I love its fangs of perfect rage<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That gnash the air;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The molten gold of its intolerable rage<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hot in the throat.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I long to be a bolshevist<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And set the stinking rubbish-heap of this foul world<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Afire at a myriad scarlet points,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A bolshevist, a salvia-face<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To lick the world with flame that licks it clean.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I long to see its chock-full crowdedness<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And glutted squirming populousness on fire<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a field of filthy weeds<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Burnt back to ash,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And then to see the new, real souls sprout up.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Not this vast rotting cabbage patch we call the world;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But from the ash-scarred fallow<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">New wild souls.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Nettles, and a rose sprout,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hibiscus, and mere grass,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Salvia still in a rage<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And almond honey-still,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And fig-wort stinking for the carrion wasp;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All the lot of them, and let them fight it out.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_68" id="page_68">{68}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But not a trace of foul equality,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Nor sound of still more foul human perfection.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You need not clear the world like a cabbage patch for me;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Leave me my nettles,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Let me fight the wicked, obstreperous weeds myself, and put them in their place,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Severely in their place.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I don’t at all want to annihilate them,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I like a row with them,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But I won’t be put on a cabbage-idealistic level of equality with them.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What rot, to see the cabbage and hibiscus-tree<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As equals!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What rot, to say the louts along the Corso<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In Sunday suits and yellow shoes<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Are my equals!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I am their superior, saluting the hibiscus flower, not them.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The same I say to the profiteers from the hotels, the money-fat-ones,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Profiteers here being called dog-fish, stinking dog-fish, sharks.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The same I say to the pale and elegant persons,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Pale-face authorities loitering tepidly:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>That I salute the red hibiscus flowers</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>And send mankind to its inferior blazes.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Mankind’s inferior blazes,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And these along with it, all the inferior lot&mdash;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">These bolshevists,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">These dog-fish,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">These precious and ideal ones,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All rubbish ready for fire.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_69" id="page_69">{69}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I salute hibiscus and the salvia flower<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Upon the breasts of loutish bolshevists,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Damned loutish bolshevists,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who perhaps will do the business after all,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the long run, in spite of themselves.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Meanwhile, alas<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">For me no fellow-men,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No salvia-frenzied comrades, antennæ<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of yellow-red, outreaching, living wrath<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Upon the smouldering air,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And throat of brimstone-molten angry gold.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Red, angry men are a race extinct, alas!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Never<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To be a bolshevist<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With a hibiscus flower behind my ear<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In sign of life, of lovely, dangerous life<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And passionate disqualify of men;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In sign of dauntless, silent violets,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And impudent nettles grabbing the under-earth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And cabbages born to be cut and eat,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And salvia fierce to crow and shout for fight,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And rosy-red hibiscus wincingly<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Unfolding all her coiled and lovely self<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In a doubtful world.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Never, bolshevistically<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To be able to stand for all these!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Alas, alas, I have got to leave it all<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To the youths in Sunday suits and yellow shoes<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who have pulled down the salvia flowers<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_70" id="page_70">{70}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And rosy delicate hibiscus flowers<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And everything else to their disgusting level,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Never, of course, to put anything up again.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But yet<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">If they pull all the world down,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The process will amount to the same in the end.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Instead of flame and flame-clean ash<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Slow watery rotting back to level muck<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And final humus,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whence the re-start.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And still I cannot bear it<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That they take hibiscus and the salvia flower.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taormina.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_71" id="page_71">{71}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_72" id="page_72">{72}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_73" id="page_73">{73}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<h2><a name="THE_EVANGELISTIC_BEASTS" id="THE_EVANGELISTIC_BEASTS"></a>THE EVANGELISTIC BEASTS</h2>
-
-<h3><a name="ST_MATTHEW" id="ST_MATTHEW"></a>ST MATTHEW</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">They</span> are not all beasts.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">One is a man, for example, and one is a bird.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I, Matthew, am a man.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">“And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me”&mdash;<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">That is Jesus.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But then Jesus was not quite a man.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He was the Son of Man<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Filius Meus, O remorseless logic<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Out of His own mouth.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I, Matthew, being a man<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Cannot be lifted up, the Paraclete<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To draw all men unto me,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Seeing I am on a par with all men.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I, on the other hand,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Am drawn to the Uplifted, as all men are drawn,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To the Son of Man<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Filius Meus</i>.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Wilt thou lift me up, Son of Man?</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">How my heart beats!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I am man.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I am man, and therefore my heart beats, and throws the dark blood from side to side<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All the time I am lifted up.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_74" id="page_74">{74}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yes, even during my uplifting.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And if it ceased?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">If it ceased, I should be no longer man<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As I am, if my heart in uplifting ceased to beat, to toss the dark blood from side to side, causing my myriad secret streams.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">After the cessation<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I might be a soul in bliss, an angel, approximating to the Uplifted;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But that is another matter;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I am Matthew, the man,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I am not that other angelic matter.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So I will be lifted up, Saviour,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But put me down again in time, Master,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Before my heart stops beating, and I become what I am not.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Put me down again on the earth, Jesus, on the brown soil<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Where flowers sprout in the acrid humus, and fade into humus again.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Where beasts drop their unlicked young, and pasture, and drop their droppings among the turf.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Where the adder darts horizontal.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Down on the damp, unceasing ground, where my feet belong<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And even my heart, Lord, forever, after all uplifting:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The crumbling, damp, fresh land, life horizontal and ceaseless.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Matthew I am, the man.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I take the wings of the morning, to Thee, Crucified, Glorified.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But while flowers club their petals at evening<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_75" id="page_75">{75}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And rabbits make pills among the short grass<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And long snakes quickly glide into the dark hole in the wall, hearing man approach,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I must be put down, Lord, in the afternoon,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And at evening I must leave off my wings of the spirit<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As I leave off my braces<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I must resume my nakedness like a fish, sinking down the dark reversion of night<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a fish seeking the bottom, Jesus,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">ΙΧΘΥΣ<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Face downwards<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Veering slowly<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Down between the steep slopes of darkness, fucus-dark, seaweed-fringed valleys of the waters under the sea<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Over the edge of the soundless cataract<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Into the fathomless, bottomless pit<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Where my soul falls in the last throes of bottomless convulsion, and is fallen<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Utterly beyond Thee, Dove of the Spirit;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Beyond everything, except itself.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Nay, Son of Man, I have been lifted up.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To Thee I rose like a rocket ending in mid-heaven.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But even Thou, Son of Man, canst not quaff out the dregs of terrestrial manhood!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They fall back from Thee.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They fall back, and like a dripping of quicksilver taking the downward track,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Break into drops, burn into drops of blood, and dropping, dropping take wing<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Membraned, blood-veined wings.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_76" id="page_76">{76}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On fans of unsuspected tissue, like bats<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They thread and thrill and flicker ever downward<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To the dark zenith of Thine antipodes<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Jesus Uplifted.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Bat-winged heart of man<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Reversed flame<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Shuddering a strange way down the bottomless pit<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To the great depths of its reversèd zenith.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Afterwards, afterwards<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Morning comes, and I shake the dews of night from the wings of my spirit<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And mount like a lark, Beloved.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But remember, Saviour,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That my heart which like a lark at heaven’s gate singing, hovers morning-bright to Thee,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Throws still the dark blood back and forth<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the avenues where the bat hangs sleeping, upside-down<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And to me undeniable, Jesus.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Listen, Paraclete.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I can no more deny the bat-wings of my fathom-flickering spirit of darkness<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Than the wings of the Morning and Thee, Thou Glorified.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I am Matthew, the Man:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It is understood.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And Thou art Jesus, Son of Man<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Drawing all men unto Thee, but bound to release them when the hour strikes.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_77" id="page_77">{77}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I have been, and I have returned.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I have mounted up on the wings of the morning, and I have dredged down to the zenith’s reversal.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which is my way, being man.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Gods may stay in mid-heaven, the Son of Man has climbed to the Whitsun zenith,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But I, Matthew, being a man<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Am a traveller back and forth.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So be it.<br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_78" id="page_78">{78}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="ST_MARK" id="ST_MARK"></a>ST MARK</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">There</span> was a lion in Judah<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which whelped, and was Mark.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But winged.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A lion with wings.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At least at Venice.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Even as late as Daniele Manin.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Why should he have wings?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is he to be a bird also?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or a spirit?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or a winged thought?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or a soaring consciousness?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Evidently he is all that<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The lion of the spirit.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Ah, Lamb of God<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Would a wingless lion lie down before Thee, as this winged lion lies?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The lion of the spirit.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Once he lay in the mouth of a cave<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And sunned his whiskers,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And lashed his tail slowly, slowly<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Thinking of voluptuousness<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Even of blood.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_79" id="page_79">{79}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But later, in the sun of the afternoon<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Having tasted all there was to taste, and having slept his fill<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He fell to frowning, as he lay with his head on his paws<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the sun coming in through the narrowest fibril of a slit in his eyes.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So, nine-tenths asleep, motionless, bored, and statically angry,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He saw in a shaft of light a lamb on a pinnacle, balancing a flag on its paw,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And he was thoroughly startled.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Going out to investigate<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He found the lamb beyond him, on the inaccessible pinnacle of light.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So he put his paw to his nose, and pondered.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">“Guard my sheep,” came the silvery voice from the pinnacle,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">“And I will give thee the wings of the morning.”<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So the lion of the senses thought it was worth it.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Hence he became a curly sheep-dog with dangerous propensities<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As Carpaccio will tell you:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Ramping round, guarding the flock of mankind,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sharpening his teeth on the wolves,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Ramping up through the air like a kestrel<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And lashing his tail above the world<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And enjoying the sensation of heaven and righteousness and voluptuous wrath.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_80" id="page_80">{80}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">There is a new sweetness in his voluptuously licking his paw<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now that it is a weapon of heaven.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">There is a new ecstasy in his roar of desirous love<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now that it sounds self-conscious through the unlimited sky.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He is well aware of himself<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And he cherishes voluptuous delights, and thinks about them<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And ceases to be a blood-thirsty king of beasts<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And becomes the faithful sheep-dog of the Shepherd, thinking of his voluptuous pleasures of chasing the sheep to the fold<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And increasing the flock, and perhaps giving a real nip here and there, a real pinch, but always well meant.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And somewhere there is a lioness<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The she-mate.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whelps play between the paws of the lion<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The she-mate purrs<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Their castle is impregnable, their cave,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The sun comes in their lair, they are well-off<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A well-to-do family.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Then the proud lion stalks abroad, alone<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And roars to announce himself to the wolves<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And also to encourage the red-cross Lamb<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And also to ensure a goodly increase in the world.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Look at him, with his paw on the world<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At Venice and elsewhere.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Going blind at last.<br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_81" id="page_81">{81}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="ST_LUKE" id="ST_LUKE"></a>ST LUKE</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">A wall</span>, a bastion,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A living forehead with its slow whorl of hair<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And a bull’s large, sombre, glancing eye<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And glistening, adhesive muzzle<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With cavernous nostrils where the winds run hot<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Snorting defiance<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or greedily snuffling behind the cows.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Horns<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The golden horns of power,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Power to kill, power to create<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Such as Moses had, and God,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Head-power.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Shall great wings flame from his shoulder-sockets<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Assyrian-wise?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It would be no wonder.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Knowing the thunder of his heart<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The massive thunder of his dew-lapped chest<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Deep and reverberating,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It would be no wonder if great wings, like flame, fanned out from the furnace-cracks of his shoulder-sockets.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Thud! Thud! Thud!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the roar of black bull’s blood in the mighty passages of his chest.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_82" id="page_82">{82}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Ah, the dewlap swings pendulous with excess.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The great, roaring weight above<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a furnace dripping a molten drip.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The urge, the massive, burning ache<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of the bull’s breast.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The open furnace-doors of his nostrils.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">For what does he ache, and groan?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">In his breast a wall?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Nay, once it was also a fortress wall, and the weight of a vast battery.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But now it is a burning hearthstone only,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Massive old altar of his own burnt offering.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">It was always an altar of burnt offering<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His own black blood poured out like a sheet of flame over his fecundating herd<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As he gave himself forth.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But also it was a fiery fortress frowning shaggily on the world<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And announcing battle ready.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Since the Lamb bewitched him with that red-struck flag<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His fortress is dismantled<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His fires of wrath are banked down<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His horns turn away from the enemy.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He serves the Son of Man.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_83" id="page_83">{83}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And hear him bellow, after many years, the bull that serves the Son of Man.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Moaning, booing, roaring hollow<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Constrained to pour forth all his fire down the narrow sluice of procreation<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Through such narrow loins, too narrow.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Is he not over-charged by the dammed-up pressure of his own massive black blood<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Luke, the Bull, the father of substance, the Providence Bull, after two thousand years?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is he not over-full of offering, a vast, vast offer of himself<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which must be poured through so small a vent?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Too small a vent.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Let him remember his horns, then.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Seal up his forehead once more to a bastion,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Let it know nothing.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Let him charge like a mighty catapult on the red-cross flag, let him roar out challenge on the world<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And throwing himself upon it, throw off the madness of his blood.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Let it be war.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And so it is war.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The bull of the proletariat has got his head down.<br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_84" id="page_84">{84}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="ST_JOHN" id="ST_JOHN"></a>ST JOHN</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">John</span>, oh John,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Thou honourable bird<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sun-peering eagle.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Taking a bird’s-eye view<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Even of Calvary and Resurrection<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Not to speak of Babylon’s whoredom.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">High over the mild effulgence of the dove<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hung all the time, did we but know it, the all-knowing shadow<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of John’s great gold-barred eagle.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">John knew all about it<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Even the very beginning.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">“In the beginning was the Word<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the Word was God<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the Word was with God.”<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Having been to school<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">John knew the whole proposition.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As for innocent Jesus<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He was one of Nature’s phenomena, no doubt.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Oh that mind-soaring eagle of an Evangelist<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Staring creation out of countenance<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And telling it off<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As an eagle staring down on the Sun!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_85" id="page_85">{85}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The Logos, the Logos!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">“In the beginning was the Word.”<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Is there not a great Mind pre-ordaining?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Does not a supreme Intellect ideally procreate the Universe?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is not each soul a vivid thought in the great consciousness stream of God?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Put salt on his tail<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The sly bird of John.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Proud intellect, high-soaring Mind<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a king eagle, bird of the most High, sweeping the round of heaven<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And casting the cycles of creation<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On two wings, like a pair of compasses;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Jesus’ pale and lambent dove, cooing in the lower boughs<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On sufferance.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">In the beginning was the Word, of course.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the word was the first offspring of the almighty Johannine mind,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Chick of the intellectual eagle.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Yet put salt on the tail of the Johannine bird<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Put salt on its tail<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">John’s eagle.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Shoo it down out of the empyrean<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of the all-seeing, all-fore-ordaining ideal.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Make it roost on bird-spattered, rocky Patmos<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And let it moult there, among the stones of the bitter sea.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_86" id="page_86">{86}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">For the almighty eagle of the fore-ordaining Mind<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is looking rather shabby and island-bound these days:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Moulting, and rather naked about the rump, and down in the beak,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Rather dirty, on dung-whitened Patmos.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">From which we are led to assume<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That the old bird is weary, and almost willing<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That a new chick should chip the extensive shell<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of the mundane egg.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The poor old golden eagle of the creative spirit<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Moulting and moping and waiting, willing at last<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">For the fire to burn it up, feathers and all<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So that a new conception of the beginning and end<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Can rise from the ashes.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Ah Phœnix, Phœnix<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">John’s Eagle!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You are only known to us now as the badge of an insurance Company.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Phœnix, Phœnix<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The nest is in flames<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Feathers are singeing,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Ash flutters flocculent, like down on a blue, wan fledgeling.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>San Gervasio.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_87" id="page_87">{87}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_88" id="page_88">{88}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_89" id="page_89">{89}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<h2><a name="CREATURES" id="CREATURES"></a>CREATURES</h2>
-
-<h3><a name="THE_MOSQUITO" id="THE_MOSQUITO"></a>THE MOSQUITO</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">When</span> did you start your tricks<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Monsieur?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What do you stand on such high legs for?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Why this length of shredded shank<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You exaltation?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In sluggish Venice.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You turn your head towards your tail, and smile.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">How can you put so much devilry<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Into that translucent phantom shred<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of a frail corpus?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A nothingness.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Yet what an aura surrounds you;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_90" id="page_90">{90}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Invisibility, and the anæsthetic power<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To deaden my attention in your direction.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In circles and evasions, enveloping me,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Ghoul on wings<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Winged Victory.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Settle, and stand on long thin shanks<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You speck.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Having read my thoughts against you.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Come then, let us play at unawares,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Man or mosquito.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You don’t know that I exist, and I don’t know that you exist.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now then!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">It is your trump<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It is your hateful little trump<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You pointed fiend,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Why do you do it?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Surely it is bad policy.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_91" id="page_91">{91}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They say you can’t help it.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Blood, red blood<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Super-magical<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Forbidden liquor.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I behold you stand<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">For a second enspasmed in oblivion,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Obscenely ecstasied<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sucking live blood<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">My blood.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Such silence, such suspended transport,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Such gorging,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Such obscenity of trespass.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You stagger<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As well as you may.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Only your accursed hairy frailty<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your own imponderable weightlessness<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Away with a pæan of derision<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You winged blood-drop.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_92" id="page_92">{92}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Can I not overtake you?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Are you one too many for me<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Winged Victory?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Siracusa.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_93" id="page_93">{93}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="FISH" id="FISH"></a>FISH</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Fish</span>, oh Fish,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So little matters!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Whether the waters rise and cover the earth<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or whether the waters wilt in the hollow places,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All one to you.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Aqueous, subaqueous,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Submerged<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And wave-thrilled.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">As the waters roll<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Roll you.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The waters wash,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You wash in oneness<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And never emerge.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Never know,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Never grasp.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Your life a sluice of sensation along your sides,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A flush at the flails of your fins, down the whorl of your tail,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And water wetly on fire in the grates of your gills;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fixed water-eyes.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Even snakes lie together.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But oh, fish, that rock in water,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You lie only with the waters;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">One touch.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_94" id="page_94">{94}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">No fingers, no hands and feet, no lips;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No tender muzzles,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No wistful bellies,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No loins of desire,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">None.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You and the naked element,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sway-wave.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Curvetting bits of tin in the evening light.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Who is it ejects his sperm to the naked flood?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the wave-mother?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who swims enwombed?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who lies with the waters of his silent passion, womb-element?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">&mdash;Fish in the waters under the earth.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What price <i>his</i> bread upon the waters?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Himself all silvery himself<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the element<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No more.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Nothing more.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Himself,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the element.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Food, of course!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Water-eager eyes,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Mouth-gate open<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And strong spine urging, driving;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And desirous belly gulping.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_95" id="page_95">{95}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Fear also!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He knows fear!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Water-eyes craning,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A rush that almost screams,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Almost fish-voice<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As the pike comes....<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Then gay fear, that turns the tail sprightly, from a shadow.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Food, and fear, and joie de vivre,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Without love.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The other way about:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Joie de vivre, and fear, and food,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All without love.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Quelle joie de vivre<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dans l’eau!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Slowly to gape through the waters,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Alone with the element;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To sink, and rise, and go to sleep with the waters;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To speak endless inaudible wavelets into the wave;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To breathe from the flood at the gills,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fish-blood slowly running next to the flood, extracting fish-fire;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To have the element under one, like a lover;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And to spring away with a curvetting click in the air,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Provocative.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dropping back with a slap on the face of the flood.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And merging oneself!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">To be a fish!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_96" id="page_96">{96}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So utterly without misgiving<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To be a fish<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the waters.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Loveless, and so lively!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Born before God was love,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or life knew loving.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Beautifully beforehand with it all.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Admitted, they swarm in companies,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fishes.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They drive in shoals.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But soundless, and out of contact.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They exchange no word, no spasm, not even anger.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Not one touch.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Many suspended together, forever apart,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Each one alone with the waters, upon one wave with the rest.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">A magnetism in the water between them only.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I saw a water-serpent swim across the Anapo,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I said to my heart, <i>look, look at him!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>With his head up, steering like a bird!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>He’s a rare one, but he belongs ...</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But sitting in a boat on the Zeller lake<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And watching the fishes in the breathing waters<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Lift and swim and go their way&mdash;<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I said to my heart, <i>who are these?</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And my heart couldn’t own them....<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_97" id="page_97">{97}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">A slim young pike, with smart fins<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And grey-striped suit, a young cub of a pike<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Slouching along away below, half out of sight,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a lout on an obscure pavement....<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Aha, there’s somebody in the know!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But watching closer<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That motionless deadly motion,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That unnatural barrel body, that long ghoul nose, ...<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I left off hailing him.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I had made a mistake, I didn’t know him,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">This grey, monotonous soul in the water,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">This intense individual in shadow,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fish-alive.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I didn’t know his God,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I didn’t know his God.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Which is perhaps the last admission that life has to wring out of us.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I saw, dimly,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Once a big pike rush,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And small fish fly like splinters.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I said to my heart, <i>there are limits</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>To you, my heart;</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>And to the one God.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Fish are beyond me.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Other Gods<br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_98" id="page_98">{98}</a></span><span class="i0">Beyond my range ... gods beyond my God ...<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They are beyond me, are fishes.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I stand at the pale of my being<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And look beyond, and see<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fish, in the outerwards,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As one stands on a bank and looks in.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I have waited with a long rod<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And suddenly pulled a gold-and-greenish, lucent fish from below,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And had him fly like a halo round my head,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Lunging in the air on the line.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Unhooked his gorping, water-horny mouth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And seen his horror-tilted eye,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His red-gold, water-precious, mirror-flat bright eye;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And felt him beat in my hand, with his mucous, leaping life-throb.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And my heart accused itself<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Thinking: <i>I am not the measure of creation.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>This is beyond me, this fish.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>His God stands outside my God.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And the gold-and-green pure lacquer-mucus comes off in my hand,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the red-gold mirror-eye stares and dies,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the water-suave contour dims.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But not before I have had to know<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He was born in front of my sunrise,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Before my day.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_99" id="page_99">{99}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He outstarts me.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I, a many-fingered horror of daylight to him,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Have made him die.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Fishes,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With their gold, red eyes, and green-pure gleam, and under-gold,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And their pre-world loneliness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And more-than-lovelessness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And white meat;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They move in other circles.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Outsiders.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Water-wayfarers.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Things of one element.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Aqueous,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Each by itself.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Cats, and the Neapolitans,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sulphur sun-beasts,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Thirst for fish as for more-than-water;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Water-alive<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To quench their over-sulphureous lusts.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But I, I only wonder<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And don’t know.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I don’t know fishes.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">In the beginning<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Jesus was called The Fish....<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And in the end.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Zell-am-See.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_100" id="page_100">{100}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="BAT" id="BAT"></a>BAT</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">At</span> evening, sitting on this terrace,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Departs, and the world is taken by surprise ...<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Brown hills surrounding ...<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Against the current of obscure Arno ...<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Look up, and you see things flying<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Between the day and the night;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Where light pushes through;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A dip to the water.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And you think:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">“The swallows are flying so late!”<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Swallows?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_101" id="page_101">{101}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Dark air-life looping<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yet missing the pure loop ...<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And serrated wings against the sky,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And falling back.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Never swallows!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Bats!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The swallows are gone.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">By the Ponte Vecchio ...<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Changing guard.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one’s scalp<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As the bats swoop overhead!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Flying madly.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Pipistrello!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Wings like bits of umbrella.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Bats!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And disgustingly upside down.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_102" id="page_102">{102}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And grinning in their sleep.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Bats!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Not for me!<br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_103" id="page_103">{103}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="MAN_AND_BAT" id="MAN_AND_BAT"></a>MAN AND BAT</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">When</span> I went into my room, at mid-morning,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Say ten o’clock ...<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">My room, a crash-box over that great stone rattle<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The Via de’ Bardi....<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">When I went into my room at mid-morning<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Why?... a bird!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">A bird<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Flying round the room in insane circles.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">In insane circles!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i> ... A bat!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">A disgusting bat<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At mid-morning!...<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Out! Go out!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Round and round and round<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With a twitchy, nervous, intolerable flight,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And a neurasthenic lunge,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And an impure frenzy;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A bat, big as a swallow.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Out, out of my room!</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_104" id="page_104">{104}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The Venetian shutters I push wide<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To the free, calm upper air;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Loop back the curtains....<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Now out, out from my room!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So to drive him out, flicking with my white handkerchief: <i>Go!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But he will not.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Round and round and round<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In an impure haste,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fumbling, a beast in air,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And stumbling, lunging and touching the walls, the bell-wires<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">About my room!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Always refusing to go out into the air<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Above that crash-gulf of the Via de’ Bardi,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yet blind with frenzy, with cluttered fear.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">At last he swerved into the window bay,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But blew back, as if an incoming wind blew him in again.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A strong inrushing wind.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And round and round and round!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Blundering more insane, and leaping, in throbs, to clutch at a corner,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At a wire, at a bell-rope:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On and on, watched relentless by me, round and round in my room,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_105" id="page_105">{105}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Round and round and dithering with tiredness and haste and increasing delirium<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Flicker-splashing round my room.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I would not let him rest;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Not one instant cleave, cling like a blot with his breast to the wall<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In an obscure corner.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Not an instant!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I flicked him on,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Trying to drive him through the window.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Again he swerved into the window bay<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I ran forward, to frighten him forth.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But he rose, and from a terror worse than me he flew past me<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Back into my room, and round, round, round in my room<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Clutch, cleave, stagger,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dropping about the air<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Getting tired.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Something seemed to blow him back from the window<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Every time he swerved at it;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Back on a strange parabola, then round, round, dizzy in my room.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He <i>could</i> not go out,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I also realised....<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It was the light of day which he could not enter,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Any more than I could enter the white-hot door of a blast-furnace.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_106" id="page_106">{106}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He could not plunge into the daylight that streamed at the window.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It was asking too much of his nature.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Worse even than the hideous terror of me with my handkerchief<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Saying: <i>Out, go out!...</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Was the horror of white daylight in the window!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So I switched on the electric light, thinking: <i>Now</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>The outside will seem brown....</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But no.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The outside did not seem brown.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And he did not mind the yellow electric light.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Silent!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He was having a silent rest.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>But never!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Not in my room.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Round and round and round<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Near the ceiling as if in a web,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Staggering;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Plunging, falling out of the web,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Broken in heaviness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Lunging blindly,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Heavier;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And clutching, clutching for one second’s pause,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Always, as if for one drop of rest,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">One little drop.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_107" id="page_107">{107}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And I!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Never</i>, I say....<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Go out!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Flying slower,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Seeming to stumble, to fall in air.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Blind-weary.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Yet never able to pass the whiteness of light into freedom ...<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A bird would have dashed through, come what might.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Fall, sink, lurch, and round and round<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Flicker, flicker-heavy;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Even wings heavy:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And cleave in a high corner for a second, like a clot, also a prayer.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>But no.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Out, you beast.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Till he fell in a corner, palpitating, spent.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And there, a clot, he squatted and looked at me.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With sticking-out, bead-berry eyes, black,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And improper derisive ears,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And shut wings,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And brown, furry body.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Brown, nut-brown, fine fur!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But it might as well have been hair on a spider; thing<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With long, black-paper ears.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_108" id="page_108">{108}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So, a dilemma!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He squatted there like something unclean.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">No, he must not squat, nor hang, obscene, in my room!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Yet nothing on earth will give him courage to pass the sweet fire of day.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What then?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hit him and kill him and throw him away?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Nay,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I didn’t create him.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Let the God that created him be responsible for his death ...<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Only, in the bright day, I will not have this clot in my room.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Let the God who is maker of bats watch with them in their unclean corners....<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I admit a God in every crevice,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But not bats in my room;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Nor the God of bats, while the sun shines.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>So out, out you brute!...</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And he lunged, flight-heavy, away from me, sideways, <i>a sghembo</i>!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And round and round and round my room, a clot with wings,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Impure even in weariness.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Wings dark skinny and flapping the air,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Lost their flicker.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Spent.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_109" id="page_109">{109}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He fell again with a little thud<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Near the curtain on the floor.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And there lay.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Ah death, death<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You are no solution!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Bats must be bats.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Only life has a way out.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the human soul is fated to wide-eyed responsibility<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In life.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So I picked him up in a flannel jacket,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Well covered, lest he should bite me.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">For I would have had to kill him if he’d bitten me, the impure one....<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And he hardly stirred in my hand, muffled up.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Hastily, I shook him out of the window.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And away he went!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fear craven in his tail.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Great haste, and straight, almost bird straight above the Via de’ Bardi.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Above that crash-gulf of exploding whips,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Towards the Borgo San Jacopo.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And now, at evening, as he flickers over the river<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dipping with petty triumphant flight, and tittering over the sun’s departure,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_110" id="page_110">{110}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I believe he chirps, pipistrello, seeing me here on this terrace writing:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>There he sits, the long loud one!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>But I am greater than he ...</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>I escaped him....</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Florence.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_111" id="page_111">{111}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_112" id="page_112">{112}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_113" id="page_113">{113}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<h2><a name="REPTILES" id="REPTILES"></a>REPTILES</h2>
-
-<h3><a name="SNAKE" id="SNAKE"></a>SNAKE</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">A snake</span> came to my water-trough<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To drink there.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I came down the steps with my pitcher<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He sipped with his straight mouth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Silently.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Someone was before me at my water-trough,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I, like a second comer, waiting.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_114" id="page_114">{114}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And stooped and drank a little more,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The voice of my education said to me<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He must be killed,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And voices in me said, If you were a man<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But must I confess how I liked him,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Into the burning bowels of this earth?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Was it humility, to feel so honoured?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I felt so honoured.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And yet those voices:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>If you were not afraid, you would kill him!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But even so, honoured still more<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That he should seek my hospitality<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From out the dark door of the secret earth.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_115" id="page_115">{115}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He drank enough<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And dickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Seeming to lick his lips,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And slowly turned his head,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Overcame me now his back was turned.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I looked round, I put down my pitcher,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I picked up a clumsy log<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I think it did not hit him,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Writhed like lightning, and was gone<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_116" id="page_116">{116}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And immediately I regretted it.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And I thought of the albatross,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I wished he would come back, my snake.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">For he seemed to me again like a king,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now due to be crowned again.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of life.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I have something to expiate;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A pettiness.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taormina.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_117" id="page_117">{117}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="BABY_TORTOISE" id="BABY_TORTOISE"></a>BABY TORTOISE</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">You</span> know what it is to be born alone,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Baby tortoise!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The first day to heave your feet little by little from the shell,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Not yet awake,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And remain lapsed on earth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Not quite alive.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if it would never open,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like some iron door;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower base<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And reach your skinny little neck<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And take your first bite at some dim bit of herbage,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Alone, small insect,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Tiny bright-eye,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Slow one.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">To take your first solitary bite<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And move on your slow, solitary hunt.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your bright, dark little eye,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your eye of a dark disturbed night,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So indomitable.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_118" id="page_118">{118}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">No one ever heard you complain.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You draw your head forward, slowly, from your little wimple<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-pinned toes,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Rowing slowly forward.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whither away, small bird?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Rather like a baby working its limbs,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Except that you make slow, ageless progress<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And a baby makes none.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The touch of sun excites you,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the long ages, and the lingering chill<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Make you pause to yawn,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Opening your impervious mouth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Suddenly beak-shaped, and very wide, like some suddenly gaping pincers;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Soft red tongue, and hard thin gums,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Then close the wedge of your little mountain front,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your face, baby tortoise.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Do you wonder at the world, as slowly you turn your head in its wimple<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And look with laconic, black eyes?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or is sleep coming over you again,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The non-life?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You are so hard to wake.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Are you able to wonder?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or is it just your indomitable will and pride of the first life<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_119" id="page_119">{119}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Looking round<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And slowly pitching itself against the inertia<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which had seemed invincible?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The vast inanimate,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Challenger.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Nay, tiny shell-bird,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you must row against,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What an incalculable inertia.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Challenger,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Little Ulysses, fore-runner,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No bigger than my thumb-nail,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Buon viaggio.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">All animate creation on your shoulder,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The ponderous, preponderate,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Inanimate universe;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">How vivid your travelling seems now, in the troubled sunshine,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Stoic, Ulyssean atom;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Suddenly hasty, reckless, on high toes.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Voiceless little bird,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Resting your head half out of your wimple<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_120" id="page_120">{120}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the slow dignity of your eternal pause.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Alone, with no sense of being alone,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And hence six times more solitary;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through immemorial ages<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your little round house in the midst of chaos.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Over the garden earth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Small bird,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Over the edge of all things.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Traveller,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With your tail tucked a little on one side<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">All life carried on your shoulder,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Invincible fore-runner.<br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_121" id="page_121">{121}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="TORTOISE_SHELL" id="TORTOISE_SHELL"></a>TORTOISE SHELL</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">The</span> Cross, the Cross<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Goes deeper in than we know,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Deeper into life;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Right into the marrow<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And through the bone.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Along the back of the baby tortoise<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The scales are locked in an arch like a bridge,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Scale-lapping, like a lobster’s sections<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or a bee’s.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Then crossways down his sides<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Tiger-stripes and wasp-bands.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Five, and five again, and five again,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And round the edges twenty-five little ones,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The sections of the baby tortoise shell.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Four, and a keystone;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Four, and a keystone;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Four, and a keystone;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Then twenty-four, and a tiny little keystone.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">It needed Pythagoras to see life playing with counters on the living back<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of the baby tortoise;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Life establishing the first eternal mathematical tablet,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Not in stone, like the Judean Lord, or bronze, but in life-clouded, life-rosy tortoise shell.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_122" id="page_122">{122}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The first little mathematical gentleman<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Stepping, wee mite, in his loose trousers<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Under all the eternal dome of mathematical law.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Fives, and tens,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Threes and fours and twelves,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All the <i>volte face</i> of decimals,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Turn him on his back,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The kicking little beetle,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching belly,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The long cleavage of division, upright of the eternal cross<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And on either side count five,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On each side, two above, on each side, two below<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The dark bar horizontal.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The Cross!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It goes right through him, the sprottling insect,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Through his cross-wise cloven psyche,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Through his five-fold complex-nature.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So turn him over on his toes again;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Four pin-point toes, and a problematical thumb-piece,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Four rowing limbs, and one wedge-balancing head,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Four and one makes five, which is the clue to all mathematics.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The Lord wrote it all down on the little slate<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of the baby tortoise.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Outward and visible indication of the plan within,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The complex, manifold involvedness of an individual creature<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_123" id="page_123">{123}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Plotted out<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On this small bird, this rudiment,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">This little dome, this pediment<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of all creation,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">This slow one.<br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_124" id="page_124">{124}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="TORTOISE_FAMILY_CONNECTIONS" id="TORTOISE_FAMILY_CONNECTIONS"></a>TORTOISE FAMILY CONNECTIONS</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">On</span> he goes, the little one,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Bud of the universe,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Pediment of life.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Setting off somewhere, apparently.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whither away, brisk egg?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">His mother deposited him on the soil as if he were no more than droppings,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And now he scuffles tinily past her as if she were an old rusty tin.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">A mere obstacle,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He veers round the slow great mound of her&mdash;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Tortoises always foresee obstacles.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">It is no use my saying to him in an emotional voice:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">“This is your Mother, she laid you when you were an egg.”<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He does not even trouble to answer: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He wearily looks the other way,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And she even more wearily looks another way still,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Each with the utmost apathy,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Incognisant,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Unaware,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Nothing.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_125" id="page_125">{125}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">As for papa,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He snaps when I offer him his offspring,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Just as he snaps when I poke a bit of stick at him,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Because he is irascible this morning, an irascible tortoise<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Being touched with love, and devoid of fatherliness.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Father and mother,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And three little brothers,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And all rambling aimless, like little perambulating pebbles scattered in the garden,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Not knowing each other from bits of earth or old tins.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Except that papa and mama are old acquaintances, of course,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Though family feeling there is none, not even the beginnings.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, sisterless<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Little tortoise.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Row on then, small pebble,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Over the clods of the autumn, wind-chilled sunshine,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Young gaiety.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Does he look for a companion?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">No, no, don’t think it.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He doesn’t know he is alone;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Isolation is his birthright,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">This atom.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">To row forward, and reach himself tall on spiny toes,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To travel, to burrow into a little loose earth, afraid of the night,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_126" id="page_126">{126}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To crop a little substance,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To move, and to be quite sure that he is moving:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Basta!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To be a tortoise!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Think of it, in a garden of inert clods<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A brisk, brindled little tortoise, all to himself&mdash;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Crœsus!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">In a garden of pebbles and insects<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To roam, and feel the slow heart beat<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Tortoise-wise, the first bell sounding<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From the warm blood, in the dark-creation morning.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Moving, and being himself,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Slow, and unquestioned,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And inordinately there, O stoic!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Wandering in the slow triumph of his own existence,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Ringing the soundless bell of his presence in chaos,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And biting the frail grass arrogantly,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Decidedly arrogantly.<br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_127" id="page_127">{127}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="LUI_ET_ELLE" id="LUI_ET_ELLE"></a>LUI ET ELLE</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">She</span> is large and matronly<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And rather dirty,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And put up with her husband,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I don’t know.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">She likes to eat.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">When food is going.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great mouthfuls,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron, pristine face<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like sudden curved scissors,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And gulping at more than she can swallow, and working her thick, soft tongue,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And having the bread hanging over her chin.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">O Mistress, Mistress,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Reptile mistress,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your eye is very dark, very bright,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And it never softens<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Although you watch.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_128" id="page_128">{128}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">She knows,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">She knows well enough to come for food,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yet she sees me not;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Reptile mistress.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless mouth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag it in horror away.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Mistress, reptile mistress,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You are almost too large, I am almost frightened.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He is much smaller,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dapper beside her,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And ridiculously small.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His, poor darling, is almost fiery.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">His wimple, his blunt-prowed face,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long, scaled, striving legs,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So striving, striving,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Are all more delicate than she,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And he has a cruel scar on his shell.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_129" id="page_129">{129}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Poor darling, biting at her feet,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Nipping her ankles,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which she drags apathetic away, though without retreating into her shell.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Agelessly silent,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And with a grim, reptile determination,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him, serpents’ long obstinacy<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of horizontal persistence.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Little old man<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his opportunity,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and seizing her scaly ankle,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And hanging grimly on,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Letting go at last as she drags away,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And closing his steel-trap face.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And how he feels it!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through chaos,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The immune, the animate,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Enveloped in isolation,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Forerunner.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now look at him!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His adolescence saw him crucified into sex,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_130" id="page_130">{130}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek his consummation beyond himself.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Divided into passionate duality,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He, so finished and immune, now broken into desirous fragmentariness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In his effort toward completion again.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into pieces,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And he must struggle after reconstruction, ignominiously.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And so behold him following the tail<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of that mud-hovel of his slowly rambling spouse,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Roaming over the sods,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Their two shells like domed boats bumping,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hers huge, his small;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Their splay feet rambling and rowing like paddles,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And stumbling mixed up in one another,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the race of love&mdash;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Two tortoises,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">She huge, he small.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">She seems earthily apathetic,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And he has a reptile’s awful persistence.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_131" id="page_131">{131}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mère Tortue.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">While I, I pity Monsieur.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">“He pesters her and torments her,” said the woman.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">How much more is <i>he</i> pestered and tormented, say I.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What can he do?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He is dumb, he is visionless,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Conceptionless.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As her earthen mound moves on,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And drags at these with his beak,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Drags and drags and bites,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull mound along.<br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_132" id="page_132">{132}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="TORTOISE_GALLANTRY" id="TORTOISE_GALLANTRY"></a>TORTOISE GALLANTRY</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Making</span> his advances<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He does not look at her, nor sniff at her,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That work beneath her while she sprawls along<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In her ungainly pace,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Her folds of skin that work and row<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And so he strains beneath her housey walls<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And catches her trouser-legs in his beak<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Suddenly, or her skinny limb,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And strange and grimly drags at her<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a dog,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Only agelessly silent, with a reptile’s awful persistency<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And doomed to partiality, partial being,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Ache, and want of being,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Want,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to add himself on to her<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Born to walk alone,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fore-runner,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now suddenly distracted into this mazy side-track,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">This awkward, harrowing pursuit,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">This grim necessity from within.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_133" id="page_133">{133}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Does she know<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As she moves eternally slowly away?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or is he driven against her with a bang, like a bird flying in the dark against a window,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All knowledgeless?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The awful concussion,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the still more awful need to persist, to follow, follow, continue,<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Driven, after æons of pristine, fore-god-like singleness and oneness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At the end of some mysterious, red-hot iron,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Driven away from himself into her tracks,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Forced to crash against her.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Stiff, gallant, irascible, crook-legged reptile,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Little gentleman,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sorry plight,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">We ought to look the other way.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Save that, having come with you so far,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">We will go on to the end.<br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_134" id="page_134">{134}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="TORTOISE_SHOUT" id="TORTOISE_SHOUT"></a>TORTOISE SHOUT</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">I thought</span> he was dumb,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I said he was dumb,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yet I’ve heard him cry.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">First faint scream,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Out of life’s unfathomable dawn,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon’s dawning rim,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Far, far off, far scream.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Tortoise <i>in extremis</i>.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Why were we crucified into sex?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As we began,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">A far, was-it-audible scream,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or did it sound on the plasm direct?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Worse than the cry of the new-born,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A scream,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A yell,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A shout,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A pæan,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A death-agony,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A birth-cry,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A submission,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_135" id="page_135">{135}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">War-cry, triumph, acute delight, death-scream reptilian,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Why was the veil torn?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The silken shriek of the soul’s torn membrane?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The male soul’s membrane<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Torn with a shriek half music, half horror.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Crucifixion.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In tortoise-nakedness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her house-roof,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And giving that fragile yell, that scream,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Super-audible,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From his pink, cleft, old-man’s mouth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Giving up the ghost,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">His scream, and his moment’s subsidence,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The moment of eternal silence,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_136" id="page_136">{136}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The inexpressible faint yell&mdash;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So he tups, and screams<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Time after time that frail, torn scream<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">After each jerk, the longish interval,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The tortoise eternity,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Age-long, reptilian persistence,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I remember, when I was a boy,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale’s piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_137" id="page_137">{137}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And running away from the sound of a woman in labour, something like an owl whooing,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The first wail of an infant,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And my mother singing to herself,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The first elements of foreign speech<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On wild dark lips.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And more than all these,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And less than all these,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">This last,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Strange, faint coition yell<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of the male tortoise at extremity,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The cross,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The wheel on which our silence first is broken,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Tearing a cry from us.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_138" id="page_138">{138}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That which is whole, torn asunder,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.<br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_139" id="page_139">{139}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_140" id="page_140">{140}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_141" id="page_141">{141}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<h2><a name="BIRDS" id="BIRDS"></a>BIRDS</h2>
-
-<h3><a name="TURKEY-COCK" id="TURKEY-COCK"></a>TURKEY-COCK</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">You</span> ruffled black blossom,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You glossy dark wind.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Your sort of gorgeousness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dark and lustrous<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And skinny repulsive<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And poppy-glossy,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is the gorgeousness that evokes my most puzzled admiration.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Your aboriginality<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Deep, unexplained,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a Red Indian darkly unfinished and aloof,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Seems like the black and glossy seeds of countless centuries.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Your wattles are the colour of steel-slag which has been red-hot<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And is going cold,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Cooling to a powdery, pale-oxydised sky-blue.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Why do you have wattles, and a naked, wattled head?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Why do you arch your naked-set eye with a more-than-comprehensible arrogance?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The vulture is bald, so is the condor, obscenely,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But only you have thrown this amazing mantilla of oxydised sky-blue<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And hot red over you.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_142" id="page_142">{142}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">This queer dross shawl of blue and vermilion,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whereas the peacock has a diadem.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I wonder why.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Perhaps it is a sort of uncanny decoration, a veil of loose skin.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Perhaps it is your assertion, in all this ostentation, of raw contradictoriness.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your wattles drip down like a shawl to your breast<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the point of your mantilla drops across your nose, unpleasantly.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Or perhaps it is something unfinished<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A bit of slag still adhering, after your firing in the furnace of creation.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Or perhaps there is something in your wattles of a bull’s dew-lap<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which slips down like a pendulum to balance the throbbing mass of a generous breast,<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The over-drip of a great passion hanging in the balance.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Only yours would be a raw, unsmelted passion, that will not quite fuse from the dross.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You contract yourself,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You arch yourself as an archer’s bow<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which quivers indrawn as you clench your spine<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Until your veiled head almost touches backward<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To the root-rising of your erected tail.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And one intense and backward-curving frisson<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Seizes you as you clench yourself together<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like some fierce magnet bringing its poles together.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_143" id="page_143">{143}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Burning, pale positive pole of your wattled head!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And from the darkness of that opposite one<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The upstart of your round-barred, sun-round tail!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Whilst between the two, along the tense arch of your back<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Blows the magnetic current in fierce blasts,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Ruffling black, shining feathers like lifted mail,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Shuddering storm wind, or a water rushing through.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Your brittle, super-sensual arrogance<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Tosses the crape of red across your brow and down your breast<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As you draw yourself upon yourself in insistence.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">It is a declaration of such tension in will<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As time has not dared to avouch, nor eternity been able to unbend<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Do what it may.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A raw American will, that has never been tempered by life;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You brittle, will-tense bird with a foolish eye.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The peacock lifts his rods of bronze<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And struts blue-brilliant out of the far East.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But watch a turkey prancing low on earth<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Drumming his vaulted wings, as savages drum<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Their rhythms on long-drawn, hollow, sinister drums.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The ponderous, sombre sound of the great drum of Huichilobos<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In pyramid Mexico, during sacrifice.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_144" id="page_144">{144}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Drum, and the turkey onrush<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sudden, demonic dauntlessness, full abreast,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All the bronze gloss of all his myriad petals<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Each one apart and instant.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Delicate frail crescent of the gentle outline of white<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At each feather-tip<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So delicate;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yet the bronze wind-well suddenly clashing<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the eye over-weening into madness.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Turkey-cock, turkey-cock<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Are you the bird of the next dawn?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Has the peacock had his day, does he call in vain, screecher, for the sun to rise?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The eagle, the dove, and the barnyard rooster, do they call in vain, trying to wake the morrow?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And do you await us, wattled father, Westward?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Will your yell do it?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Take up the trail of the vanished American<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Where it disappeared at the foot of the crucifix.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Take up the primordial Indian obstinacy,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The more than human, dense insistence of will,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And disdain, and blankness, and onrush, and prise open the new day with them?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The East a dead letter, and Europe moribund.... Is that so?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And those sombre, dead, feather-lustrous Aztecs, Amerindians,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In all the sinister splendour of their red blood sacrifices,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_145" id="page_145">{145}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Do they stand under the dawn, half-godly, half-demon, awaiting the cry of the turkey-cock?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Or must you go through the fire once more, till you’re smelted pure,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Slag-wattled turkey-cock,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dross-jabot?<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Fiesole.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_146" id="page_146">{146}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="HUMMING-BIRD" id="HUMMING-BIRD"></a>HUMMING-BIRD</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">I can</span> imagine, in some otherworld<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Primeval-dumb, far back<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Humming-birds raced down the avenues.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Before anything had a soul,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">This little bit chipped off in brilliance<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I believe there were no flowers, then<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Probably he was big<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Luckily for us.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Española.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_147" id="page_147">{147}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="EAGLE_IN_NEW_MEXICO" id="EAGLE_IN_NEW_MEXICO"></a>EAGLE IN NEW MEXICO</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Towards</span> the sun, towards the south-west<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A scorched breast.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A scorched breast, breasting the sun like an answer,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a retort.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">An eagle at the top of a low cedar-bush<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On the sage-ash desert<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Reflecting the scorch of the sun from his breast;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Eagle, with the sickle dripping darkly above.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Erect, scorched-pallid out of the hair of the cedar,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Erect, with the god-thrust entering him from below,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Eagle gloved in feathers<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In scorched white feathers<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In burnt dark feathers<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In feathers still fire-rusted;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sickle-overswept, sickle dripping over and above.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Sun-breaster,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Staring two ways at once, to right and left;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Masked-one<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dark-visaged<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sickle-masked<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With iron between your two eyes;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You feather-gloved<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To the feet;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Foot-fierce;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Erect one;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The god-thrust entering you steadily from below.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_148" id="page_148">{148}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You never look at the sun with your two eyes.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Only the inner eye of your scorched broad breast<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Looks straight at the sun.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You are dark<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Except scorch-pale-breasted;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And dark cleaves down and weapon-hard downward curving<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At your scorched breast,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a sword of Damocles,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Beaked eagle.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You’ve dipped it in blood so many times<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That dark face-weapon, to temper it well,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Blood-thirsty bird.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Why do you front the sun so obstinately,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">American eagle?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As if you owed him an old, old grudge, great sun: or an old, old allegiance.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">When you pick the red smoky heart from a rabbit or a light-blooded bird<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Do you lift it to the sun, as the Aztec priests used to lift red hearts of men?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Does the sun need steam of blood do you think<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In America, still,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Old eagle?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Does the sun in New Mexico sail like a fiery bird of prey in the sky<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hovering?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_149" id="page_149">{149}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Does he shriek for blood?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Does he fan great wings above the prairie, like a hovering, blood-thirsty bird?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And are you his priest, big eagle<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whom the Indians aspire to?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is there a bond of bloodshed between you?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Is your continent cold from the ice-age still, that the sun is so angry?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is the blood of your continent somewhat reptilian still,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That the sun should be greedy for it?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I don’t yield to you, big, jowl-faced eagle.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Nor you nor your blood-thirsty sun<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That sucks up blood<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Leaving a nervous people.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Fly off, big bird with a big black back,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fly slowly away, with a rust of fire in your tail,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dark as you are on your dark side, eagle of heaven.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Even the sun in heaven can be curbed and chastened at last<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">By the life in the hearts of men.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And you, great bird, sun-starer, heavy black beak<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Can be put out of office as sacrifice bringer.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taos.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_150" id="page_150">{150}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="THE_BLUE_JAY" id="THE_BLUE_JAY"></a>THE BLUE JAY</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">The</span> blue jay with a crest on his head<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Comes round the cabin in the snow.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He runs in the snow like a bit of blue metal,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Turning his back on everything.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">From the pine-tree that towers and hisses like a pillar of shaggy cloud<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Immense above the cabin<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Comes a strident laugh as we approach, this little black dog and I.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So halts the little black bitch on four spread paws in the snow<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And looks up inquiringly into the pillar of cloud,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With a tinge of misgiving.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Ca-a-a!</i> comes the scrape of ridicule out of the tree.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>What voice of the Lord is that, from the tree of smoke?</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Oh Bibbles, little black bitch in the snow,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With a pinch of snow in the groove of your silly snub nose.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What do you look at <i>me</i> for?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What do you look at me for, with such misgiving?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">It’s the blue jay laughing at us.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It’s the blue jay jeering at us, Bibs.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Every day since the snow is here<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The blue jay paces round the cabin, very busy, picking up bits,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_151" id="page_151">{151}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Turning his back on us all,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And bobbing his thick dark crest about the snow, as if darkly saying:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>I ignore those folk who look out</i>.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You acid-blue metallic bird,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You thick bird with a strong crest<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who are you?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whose boss are you, with all your bully way?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You copper-sulphate blue-bird!<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Lobo.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_153" id="page_153">{153}</a></span><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_152" id="page_152">{152}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_154" id="page_154">{154}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_155" id="page_155">{155}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<h2><a name="ANIMALS" id="ANIMALS"></a>ANIMALS</h2>
-
-<h3><a name="ASS" id="ASS"></a>THE ASS</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">The</span> long-drawn bray of the ass<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the Sicilian twilight&mdash;<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>All mares are dead!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>All mares are dead!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Oh-h!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Oh-h-h!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Oh-h-h-h-h&mdash;h!!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>I can’t!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Oh, I can’t!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Oh&mdash;</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>There’s one left!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>There’s one left!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>One!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>There’s one ... left....</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So ending on a grunt of agonised relief.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">This is the authentic Arabic interpretation of the braying of the ass.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And Arabs should know.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And yet, as his brass-resonant howling yell resounds through the Sicilian twilight<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I am not sure&mdash;<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">His big, furry head,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His big, regretful eyes,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_156" id="page_156">{156}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His diminished, drooping hindquarters,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His small toes.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Such a dear!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Such an ass!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With such a knot inside him!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He regrets something that he remembers.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That’s obvious.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The Steppes of Tartary,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the wind in his teeth for a bit,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And <i>noli me tangere</i>.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Ah then, when he tore the wind with his teeth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And trod wolves underfoot,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And over-rode his mares as if he were savagely leaping an obstacle, to set his teeth in the sun....<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Somehow, alas, he fell in love,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And was sold into slavery.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He fell into the rut of love,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Poor ass, like man, always in a rut,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The pair of them alike in that.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">All his soul in his gallant member<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And his head gone heavy with the knowledge of desire<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And humiliation.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The ass was the first of all animals to fall finally into love,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From obstacle-leaping pride,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Mare obstacle,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Into love, mare-goal, and the knowledge of love.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_157" id="page_157">{157}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hence Jesus rode him in the Triumphant Entry.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hence his beautiful eyes.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hence his ponderous head, brooding over desire, and downfall, Jesus, and a pack-saddle,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hence he uncovers his big ass-teeth and howls in that agony that is half-insatiable desire and half-unquenchable humiliation.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hence the black cross on his shoulders.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The Arabs were only half right, though they hinted the whole;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Everlasting lament in everlasting desire.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">See him standing with his head down, near the Porta Cappuccini,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Asinello,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Somaro;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With the half-veiled, beautiful eyes, and the pensive face not asleep,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Motionless, like a bit of rock.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Has he seen the Gorgon’s head, and turned to stone?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Alas, Love did it.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now he’s a jackass, a pack-ass, a donkey, somaro, burro, with a boss piling loads on his back.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Tied by the nose at the Porta Cappuccini.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And tied in a knot, inside, dead-licked between two desires:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To overleap like a male all mares as obstacles<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In a leap at the sun;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_158" id="page_158">{158}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And to leap in one last heart-bursting leap like a male at the goal of a mare,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And there end.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Well, you can’t have it both roads.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Hee! Hee! Ehee! Ehow! Ehaw!! Oh! Oh! Oh-h-h!!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The wave of agony bursts in the stone that he was,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Bares his long ass’s teeth, flattens his long ass’s ears, straightens his donkey neck,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And howls his pandemonium on the indignant air.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Yes, it’s a quandary.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Jesus rode on him, the first burden on the first beast of burden.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Love on a submissive ass.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So the tale began.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But the ass never forgets.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The horse, being nothing but a nag, will forget.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And men, being mostly geldings and knacker-boned hacks, have almost all forgot.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But the ass is a primal creature, and never forgets.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The Steppes of Tartary,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And Jesus on a meek ass-colt: mares: Mary escaping to Egypt: Joseph’s cudgel.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Hee! Hee! Ehee! Ehow-ow-!-ow!-aw!-aw!-aw!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>All mares are dead!</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_159" id="page_159">{159}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Or else I am dead!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>One of us, or the pair of us,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>I don’t know&mdash;ow!&mdash;ow!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Which!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Not sure&mdash;ure&mdash;ure</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Quite which!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Which!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taormina.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_160" id="page_160">{160}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="HE-GOAT" id="HE-GOAT"></a>HE-GOAT</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">See</span> his black nose snubbed back, pressed over like a whale’s blow-holes,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As if his nostrils were going to curve back to the root of his tail.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">As he charges slow among the herd<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And rows among the females like a ship pertinaciously,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Heavy with a rancid cargo, through the lesser ships&mdash;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Old father<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sniffing forever ahead of him, at the rear of the goats, that they lift the little door,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And rowing on, unarrived, no matter how often he enter:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a big ship pushing her bowsprit over the little ships<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Then swerving and steering afresh<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And never, never arriving at journey’s end, at the rear of the female ships.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Yellow eyes incomprehensible with thin slits<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To round-eyed us.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Yet if you had whorled horns of bronze in a frontal dark wall<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At the end of a back-bone ridge, like a straight sierra roquena,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And nerves urging forward to the wall, you’d have eyes like his,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Especially if, being given a needle’s eye of egress elsewhere<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You tried to look back to it, and couldn’t.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_161" id="page_161">{161}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sometimes he turns with a start, to fight, to challenge, to suddenly butt.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And then you see the God that he is, in a cloud of black hair<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And storm-lightning-slitted eye.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Splendidly planting his feet, one rocky foot striking the ground with a sudden rock-hammer announcement.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>I am here!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And suddenly lowering his head, the whorls of bone and of horn<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Slowly revolving towards unexploded explosion,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As from the stem of his bristling, lightning-conductor tail<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In a rush up the shrieking duct of his vertebral way<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Runs a rage drawn in from the other divinely through him<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Towards a shock and a crash and a smiting of horns ahead.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">That is a grand old lust of his, to gather the great<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Rage of the sullen-stagnating atmosphere of goats<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And bring it hurtling to a head, with crash of horns against the horns<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of the opposite enemy goat,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Thus hammering the mettle of goats into proof, and smiting out<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The godhead of goats from the shock.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Things of iron are beaten on the anvil,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And he-goat is anvil to he-goat, and hammer to he-goat<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the business of beating the mettle of goats to a godhead.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_162" id="page_162">{162}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But they’ve taken his enemy from him<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And left him only his libidinousness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His nostrils turning back, to sniff at even himself<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And his slitted eyes seeking the needle’s eye,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His own, unthreaded, forever.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So it is, when they take the enemy from us,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And we can’t fight.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He is not fatherly, like the bull, massive Providence of hot blood;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The goat is an egoist, aware of himself, devilish aware of himself,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And full of malice prepense, and overweening, determined to stand on the highest peak<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like the devil, and look on the world as his own.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And as for love:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With a needle of long red flint he stabs in the dark<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At the living rock he is up against;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">While she with her goaty mouth stands smiling the while as he strikes, since sure<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He will never <i>quite</i> strike home, on the target-quick, for her quick<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is just beyond range of the arrow he shoots<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From his leap at the zenith in her, so it falls just short of the mark, far enough.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It is over before it is finished.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">She, smiling with goaty munch-mouth, Mona Lisa, arranges it so.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_163" id="page_163">{163}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Orgasm after orgasm after orgasm<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And he smells so rank and his nose goes back,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And never an enemy brow-metalled to thresh it out with in the open field;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Never a mountain peak, to be king of the castle.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Only those eternal females to overleap and surpass, and never succeed.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The involved voluptuousness of the soft-footed cat<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who is like a fur folding a fur,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The cat who laps blood, and knows<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The soft welling of blood invincible even beyond bone or metal of bone.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The soft, the secret, the unfathomable blood<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The cat has lapped<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And known it subtler than frisson-shaken nerves,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Stronger than multiplicity of bone on bone<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And darker than even the arrows of violentest will<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Can pierce, for that is where will gives out, like a sinking stone that can sink no further.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But he-goat,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Black procreant male of the selfish will and libidinous desire,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">God in black cloud with curving horns of bronze,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Find an enemy, Egoist, and clash the cymbals in face-to-face defiance,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And let the lightning out of your smothered dusk.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Forget the female herd for a bit,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And fight to be boss of the world.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_164" id="page_164">{164}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fight, old Satan with a selfish will, fight for your selfish will;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fight to be the devil on the tip of the peak<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Overlooking the world for his own.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But bah, how can he, poor domesticated beast!<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taormina.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_165" id="page_165">{165}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="SHE-GOAT" id="SHE-GOAT"></a>SHE-GOAT</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Goats</span> go past the back of the house like dry leaves in the dawn,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And up the hill like a river, if you watch.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">At dusk they patter back like a bough being dragged on the ground,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Raising dusk and acridity of goats, and bleating.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Our old goat we tie up at night in the shed at the back of the broken Greek tomb in the garden,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And when the herd goes by at dawn she begins to bleat for me to come down and untie her.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Merr&mdash;err&mdash;err! Merr&mdash;er&mdash;errr! Mer! Mé!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Wait, wait a bit, I’ll come when I’ve lit the fire.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Merrr!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Exactly.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Mé! Mer! Merrrrrrr!!!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Tace, tu, crapa, bestia!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Merr-ererrr-ererrrr! Merrrr!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">She is such an alert listener, with her ears wide, to know am I coming!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Such a canny listener, from a distance, looking upwards, lending first one ear, then another.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">There she is, perched on her manger, looking over the boards into the day<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a belle at her window.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_166" id="page_166">{166}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And immediately she sees me she blinks, stares, doesn’t know me, turns her head and ignores me vulgarly with a wooden blank on her face.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What do I care for her, the ugly female, standing up there with her long tangled sides like an old rug thrown over a fence.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But she puts her nose down shrewdly enough when the knot is untied,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And jumps staccato to earth, a sharp, dry jump, still ignoring me,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Pretending to look round the stall.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Come on, you, crapa! I’m not your servant!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">She turns her head away with an obtuse, female sort of deafness, bête.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And then invariably she crouches her rear and makes water.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That being her way of answer, if I speak to her.&mdash;Self-conscious!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Le bestie non parlano, poverine!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">She was bought at Giardini fair, on the sands, for six hundred lire.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">An obstinate old witch, almost jerking the rope from my hands to eat the acanthus, or bite at the almond buds, and make me wait.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yet the moment I hate her she trips mild and smug like a woman going to mass.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The moment I really detest her.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_167" id="page_167">{167}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Queer it is, suddenly, in the garden<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To catch sight of her standing like some huge, ghoulish grey bird in the air, on the bough of the leaning almond-tree,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Straight as a board on the bough, looking down like some hairy horrid God the Father in a William Blake imagination.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Come down, crapa, out of that almond tree!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Instead of which she strangely rears on her perch in the air, vast beast,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And strangely paws the air, delicate,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And reaches her black-striped face up like a snake, far up,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Subtly, to the twigs overhead, far up, vast beast,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And snaps them sharp, with a little twist of her anaconda head;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All her great hairy-shaggy belly open against the morning.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">At seasons she curls back her tail like a green leaf in the fire,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or like a lifted hand, hailing at her wrong end.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And having exposed the pink place of her nakedness, fixedly,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">She trots on blithe toes,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And if you look at her, she looks back with a cold, sardonic stare.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sardonic, sardonyx, rock of cold fire.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>See me?</i> She says, <i>That’s me!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">That’s her.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Then she leaps the rocks like a quick rock,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Her back-bone sharp as a rock,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sheer will.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_168" id="page_168">{168}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Along which ridge of libidinous magnetism<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Defiant, curling the leaf of her tail as if she were curling her lip behind her at all life,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Libidinous desire runs back and forth, asserting itself in that little lifted bare hand.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Yet she has such adorable spurty kids, like spurts of black ink.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And in a month again is as if she had never had them.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And when the billy goat mounts her<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">She is brittle as brimstone.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">While his slitted eyes squint back to the roots of his ears.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taormina.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_169" id="page_169">{169}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="ELEPHANT" id="ELEPHANT"></a>ELEPHANT</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">You</span> go down shade to the river, where naked men sit on flat brown rocks, to watch the ferry, in the sun;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And you cross the ferry with the naked people, go up the tropical lane<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Through the palm-trees and past hollow paddy-fields where naked men are threshing rice<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the monolithic water-buffaloes, like old, muddy stones with hair on them, are being idle;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And through the shadow of bread-fruit trees, with their dark green, glossy, fanged leaves<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Very handsome, and some pure yellow fanged leaves;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Out into the open, where the path runs on the top of a dyke between paddy-fields:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And there, of course, you meet a huge and mud-grey elephant advancing his frontal bone, his trunk curled round a log of wood:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So you step down the bank, to make way.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Shuffle, shuffle, and his little wicked eye has seen you as he advances above you,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The slow beast curiously spreading his round feet for the dust.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the slim naked man slips down, and the beast deposits the lump of wood, carefully.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The keeper hooks the vast knee, the creature salaams.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">White man, you are saluted.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Pay a few cents.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_170" id="page_170">{170}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But the best is the Pera-hera, at midnight, under the tropical stars,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With a pale little wisp of a Prince of Wales, diffident, up in a small pagoda on the temple side<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And white people in evening dress buzzing and crowding the stand upon the grass below and opposite:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And at last the Pera-hera procession, flambeaux aloft in the tropical night, of blazing cocoa-nut,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Naked dark men beneath,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the huge frontal of three great elephants stepping forth to the tom-tom’s beat, in the torch-light,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Slowly sailing in gorgeous apparel through the flame-light, in front of a towering, grimacing white image of wood.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The elephant bells striking slow, tong-tong, tong-tong,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To music and queer chanting:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Enormous shadow-processions filing on in the flare of fire<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the fume of cocoa-nut oil, in the sweating tropical night,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the noise of the tom-toms and singers;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Elephants after elephants curl their trunks, vast shadows, and some cry out<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As they approach and salaam, under the dripping fire of the torches<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That pale fragment of a Prince up there, whose motto is <i>Ich dien</i>.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Pale, dispirited Prince, with his chin on his hands, his nerves tired out,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Watching and hardly seeing the trunk-curl approach and clumsy, knee-lifting salaam<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of the hugest, oldest of beasts in the night and the fire-flare below.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_171" id="page_171">{171}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He is royalty, pale and dejected fragment up aloft.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And down below huge homage of shadowy beasts; barefoot and trunk-lipped in the night.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Chieftains, three of them abreast, on foot<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Strut like peg-tops, wound around with hundreds of yards of fine linen.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They glimmer with tissue of gold, and golden threads on a jacket of velvet,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And their faces are dark, and fat, and important.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They are royalty, dark-faced royalty, showing the conscious whites of their eyes<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And stepping in homage, stubborn, to that nervous pale lad up there.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">More elephants, tong, tong-tong, loom up,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Huge, more tassels swinging, more dripping fire of new cocoa-nut cressets<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">High, high flambeaux, smoking of the east;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And scarlet hot embers of torches knocked out of the sockets among bare feet of elephants and men on the path in the dark.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And devil dancers luminous with sweat, dancing on to the shudder of drums,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Tom-toms, weird music of the devil, voices of men from the jungle singing;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Endless, under the Prince.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Towards the tail of the everlasting procession<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the long hot night, mere dancers from insignificant villages,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And smaller, more frightened elephants.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_172" id="page_172">{172}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Men-peasants from jungle villages dancing and running with sweat and laughing,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Naked dark men with ornaments on, on their naked arms and their naked breasts, the grooved loins<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Gleaming like metal with running sweat as they suddenly turn, feet apart,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And dance, and dance, forever dance, with breath half sobbing in dark, sweat-shining breasts,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And lustrous great tropical eyes unveiled now, gleaming a kind of laugh,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A naked, gleaming dark laugh, like a secret out in the dark,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And flare of a tropical energy, tireless, afire in the dark, slim limbs and breasts,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Perpetual, fire-laughing motion, among the slow shuffle<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of elephants,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The hot dark blood of itself a-laughing, wet, half-devilish, men all motion<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Approaching under that small pavilion, and tropical eyes dilated look up<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Inevitably look up<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To the Prince<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To that tired remnant of royalty up there<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whose motto is <i>Ich dien</i>.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">As if the homage of the kindled blood of the east<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Went up in wavelets to him, from the breasts and eyes of jungle torch-men,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And he couldn’t take it.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What would they do, those jungle men running with sweat, with the strange dark laugh in their eyes, glancing up,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the sparse-haired elephants slowly following,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_173" id="page_173">{173}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">If they knew that his motto was <i>Ich dien</i>?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And that he meant it.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They begin to understand<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The rickshaw boys begin to understand<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And then the devil comes into their faces,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But a different sort, a cold, rebellious, jeering devil.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">In elephants and the east are two devils, in all men maybe.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The mystery of the dark mountain of blood, reeking in homage, in lust, in rage,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And passive with everlasting patience,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Then the little, cunning pig-devil of the elephant’s lurking eyes, the unbeliever.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">We dodged, when the Pera-hera was finished, under the hanging, hairy pigs’ tails<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the flat, flaccid mountains of the elephants’ standing haunches,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Vast-blooded beasts,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Myself so little dodging rather scared against the eternal wrinkled pillars of their legs, as they were being dismantled;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Then I knew they were dejected, having come to hear the repeated<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Royal summons: <i>Dient Ihr!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Serve!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Serve, vast mountainous blood, in submission and splendour, serve royalty.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Instead of which, the silent, fatal emission from that pale, shattered boy up there:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Ich dien.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_174" id="page_174">{174}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">That’s why the night fell in frustration.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That’s why, as the elephants ponderously, with unseeming swiftness, galloped uphill in the night, going back to the jungle villages,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As the elephant bells sounded tong-tong-tong, bell of the temple of blood in the night, swift-striking,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the crowd like a field of rice in the dark gave way like liquid to the dark<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Looming gallop of the beasts,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It was as if the great bare bulks of elephants in the obscure light went over the hill-brow swiftly, with their tails between their legs, in haste to get away,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Their bells sounding frustrate and sinister.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And all the dark-faced, cotton-wrapped people, more numerous and whispering than grains of rice in a ricefield at night,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All the dark-faced, cotton-wrapped people, a countless host on the shores of the lake, like thick wild rice by the water’s edge,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Waiting for the fireworks of the after-show,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As the rockets went up, and the glare passed over countless faces, dark as black rice growing,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Showing a glint of teeth, and glancing tropical eyes aroused in the night,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">There was the faintest twist of mockery in every face, across the hiss of wonders as the rocket burst<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">High, high up, in flakes, shimmering flakes of blue fire, above the palm-trees of the islet in the lake,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">O faces upturned to the glare, O tropical wonder, wonder, a miracle in heaven!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_175" id="page_175">{175}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the shadow of a jeer, of underneath disappointment, as the rocket-coruscation died, and shadow was the same as before.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They were foiled, the myriad whispering dark-faced cotton-wrapped people.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They had come to see royalty,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To bow before royalty, in the land of elephants, bow deep, bow deep.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Bow deep, for it’s good as a draught of cool water to bow very, very low to the royal.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And all there was to bow to, a weary, diffident boy whose motto is <i>Ich dien</i>.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>I serve! I serve!</i> in all the weary iron of his mien&mdash;<i>’Tis I who serve!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Drudge to the public.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I wish they had given the three feathers to me;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That I had been he in the pavilion, as in a pepper-box aloft and alone<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To stand and hold feathers, three feathers above the world,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And say to them: <i>Dient Ihr! Dient!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Omnes, vos omnes, servite.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Serve me, I am meet to be served.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Being royal of the gods.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And to the elephants:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>First great beasts of the earth</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>A prince has come back to you,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Blood-mountains.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Crook the knee and be glad.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Kandy.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_176" id="page_176">{176}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="KANGAROO" id="KANGAROO"></a>KANGAROO</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">In</span> the northern hemisphere<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Life seems to leap at the air, or skim under the wind<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like stags on rocky ground, or pawing horses, or springy scut-tailed rabbits.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Or else rush horizontal to charge at the sky’s horizon,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like bulls or bisons or wild pigs.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Or slip like water slippery towards its ends,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As foxes, stoats, and wolves, and prairie dogs.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Only mice, and moles, and rats, and badgers, and beavers, and perhaps bears<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Seem belly-plumbed to the earth’s mid-navel.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or frogs that when they leap come flop, and flop to the centre of the earth.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But the yellow antipodal Kangaroo, when she sits up,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who can unseat her, like a liquid drop that is heavy, and just touches earth.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The downward drip.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The down-urge.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So much denser than cold-blooded frogs.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Delicate mother Kangaroo<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sitting up there rabbit-wise, but huge, plumb-weighted,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_177" id="page_177">{177}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And lifting her beautiful slender face, oh! so much more gently and finely lined than a rabbit’s, or than a hare’s,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Lifting her face to nibble at a round white peppermint drop, which she loves, sensitive mother Kangaroo.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Her sensitive, long, pure-bred face.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Her full antipodal eyes, so dark,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So big and quiet and remote, having watched so many empty dawns in silent Australia.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Her little loose hands, and drooping Victorian shoulders.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And then her great weight below the waist, her vast pale belly<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With a thin young yellow little paw hanging out, and straggle of a long thin ear, like ribbon,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a funny trimming to the middle of her belly, thin little dangle of an immature paw, and one thin ear.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Her belly, her big haunches<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And in addition, the great muscular python-stretch of her tail.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">There, she shan’t have any more peppermint drops.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So she wistfully, sensitively sniffs the air, and then turns, goes off in slow sad leaps<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">On the long flat skis of her legs,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Steered and propelled by that steel-strong snake of a tail.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Stops again, half turns, inquisitive to look back.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">While something stirs quickly in her belly, and a lean little face comes out, as from a window,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Peaked and a bit dismayed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_178" id="page_178">{178}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Only to disappear again quickly away from the sight of the world, to snuggle down in the warmth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Leaving the trail of a different paw hanging out.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Still she watches with eternal, cocked wistfulness!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">How full her eyes are, like the full, fathomless, shining eyes of an Australian black-boy<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who has been lost so many centuries on the margins of existence!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">She watches with insatiable wistfulness.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Untold centuries of watching for something to come,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">For a new signal from life, in that silent lost land of the South.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Where nothing bites but insects and snakes and the sun, small life.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Where no bull roared, no cow ever lowed, no stag cried, no leopard screeched, no lion coughed, no dog barked,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But all was silent save for parrots occasionally, in the haunted blue bush.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Wistfully watching, with wonderful liquid eyes.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And all her weight, all her blood, dripping sack-wise down towards the earth’s centre,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the live little one taking in its paw at the door of her belly.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Leap then, and come down on the line that draws to the earth’s deep, heavy centre.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Sydney</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_179" id="page_179">{179}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="BIBBLES" id="BIBBLES"></a>BIBBLES</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Bibbles</span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Little black dog in New Mexico,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Little black snub-nosed bitch with a shoved-out jaw<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And a wrinkled reproachful look;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Little black female pup, sort of French bull, they say,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With bits of brindle coming through, like rust, to show you’re not pure;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Not pure, Bibbles,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Bubsey, bat-eared dog;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Not black enough!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">First live thing I’ve “owned” since the lop-eared rabbits when I was a lad,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And those over-prolific white mice, and Adolf, and Rex whom I didn’t own.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And even now, Bibbles, little Ma’am, it’s you who appropriated me, not I you.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As Benjamin Franklin appropriated Providence to his purposes.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Oh Bibbles, black little bitch<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I’d never have let you appropriate me, had I known.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I never dreamed, till now, of the awful time the Lord must have, “owning” humanity,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Especially democratic live-by-love humanity.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Oh Bibbles, oh Pips, oh Pipsey<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You little black love-bird!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_180" id="page_180">{180}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Don’t</i> you love <i>everybody</i>!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Just everybody.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You love ’em all.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Believe in the One Identity, don’t you,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You little Walt-Whitmanesque bitch?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">First time I lost you in Taos plaza,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And found you after endless chasing,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Came upon you prancing round the corner in exuberant, bibbling affection<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">After the black-green skirts of a yellow-green old Mexican woman<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who hated you, and kept looking round at you and cursing you in a mutter,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">While you pranced and bounced with love of her, you indiscriminating animal,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All your wrinkled <i>miserere</i> Chinese black little face beaming<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And your black little body bouncing and wriggling<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With indiscriminate love, Bibbles;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I had a moment’s pure detestation of you.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">As I rushed like an idiot round the corner after you<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yelling: <i>Pips! Pips! Bibbles!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I’ve had moments of hatred of you since,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Loving everybody!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">“To you, whoever you are, with endless embrace!”&mdash;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That’s you, Pipsey,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With your imbecile bit of a tail in a love-flutter.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You omnipip.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_181" id="page_181">{181}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Not that you’re merely a softy, oh dear me no.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You know which side your bread is buttered.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You don’t care a rap for anybody.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But you love lying warm between warm human thighs, indiscriminate,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And you love to make somebody love you, indiscriminate,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You love to lap up affection, to wallow in it,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And then turn tail to the next comer, for a new dollop.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And start prancing and licking and cuddling again, indiscriminate.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Oh yes, I know your little game.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Yet you’re so nice,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So quick, like a little black dragon.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So fierce, when the coyotes howl, barking like a whole little lion, and rumbling,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And starting forward in the dusk, with your little black fur all bristling like plush<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Against those coyotes, who would swallow you like an oyster.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And in the morning, when the bedroom door is opened,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Rushing in like a little black whirlwind, leaping straight as an arrow on the bed at the pillow<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And turning the day suddenly into a black tornado of <i>joie de vivre</i>, Chinese dragon.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So funny<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Lobbing wildly through deep snow like a rabbit,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hurtling like a black ball through the snow,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Champing it, tossing a mouthful,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Little black spot in the landscape!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_182" id="page_182">{182}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So absurd<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Pelting behind on the dusty trail when the horse sets off home at a gallop:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Left in the dust behind like a dust-ball tearing along<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Coming up on fierce little legs, tearing fast to catch up, a real little dust-pig, ears almost blown away,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And black eyes bulging bright in a dust-mask<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Chinese-dragon-wrinkled, with a pink mouth grinning, under jaw shoved out<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And white teeth showing in your dragon-grin as you race, you split-face,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a trundling projectile swiftly whirling up,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Cocking your eyes at me as you come alongside, to see if I’m I on the horse,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And panting with that split grin,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All your game little body dust-smooth like a little pig, poor Pips.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Plenty of game old spirit in you, Bibbles.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Plenty of game old spunk, little bitch.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">How you hate being brushed with the boot-brush, to brush all that dust out of your wrinkled face,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Don’t you?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">How you hate being made to look undignified, Ma’am;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">How you hate being laughed at, Miss Superb!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Blackberry face!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Plenty of conceit in you.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Unblemished belief in your own perfection<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_183" id="page_183">{183}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And utter lovableness, you ugly-mug;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Chinese puzzle-face,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Wrinkled underhung physiog that looks as if it had done with everything,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Through with everything.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Instead of which you sit there and roll your head like a canary<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And show a tiny bunch of white teeth in your underhung blackness,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Self-conscious little bitch,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Aiming again at being loved.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Let the merest scallywag come to the door and you leap your very dearest-love at him,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As if now, at last, here was the one you <i>finally</i> loved,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Finally loved;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And even the dirtiest scallywag is taken in,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Thinking: <i>This dog sure has taken a fancy to me</i>.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You miserable little bitch of love-tricks,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I know your game.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Me or the Mexican who comes to chop wood<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All the same,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All humanity is jam to you.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Everybody so dear, and yourself so ultra-beloved<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That you have to run out at last and eat filth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Gobble up filth, you horror, swallow utter abomination and fresh-dropped dung.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_184" id="page_184">{184}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You stinker.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You worse than a carrion-crow.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Reeking dung-mouth.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You love-bird.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Reject nothing</i>, sings Walt Whitman.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So you, you go out at last and eat the unmentionable,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In your appetite for affection.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And then you run in to vomit it in my house!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I get my love back.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I have to clean up after you, filth which even blind Nature rejects<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From the pit of your stomach;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But you, you snout-face, you reject nothing, you merge so much in love<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You must eat even that.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Then when I dust you a bit with a juniper twig<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You run straight away to live with somebody else,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fawn before them, and love them as if they were the ones you had <i>really</i> loved all along.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And they’re taken in.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They feel quite tender over you, till you play the same trick on them, dirty bitch.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Fidelity! Loyalty! Attachment!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Oh, these are abstractions to your nasty little belly.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You must always be a-waggle with LOVE.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Such a waggle of love you can hardly distinguish one human from another.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_185" id="page_185">{185}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You love one after another, on one condition, that each one loves you most.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Democratic little bull-bitch, dirt-eating little swine.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But now, my lass, you’ve got your Nemesis on your track,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now you’ve come sex-alive, and the great ranch-dogs are all after you.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They’re after what they can get, and don’t you turn tail!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You loved ’em all so much before, didn’t you, loved ’em indiscriminate.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You don’t love ’em now.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They want something of you, so you squeak and come pelting indoors.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Come pelting to me, now the other folk have found you out, and the dogs are after you.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Oh yes, you’re found out. I heard them kick you out of the ranch house.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Get out, you little, soft fool!!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And didn’t you turn your eyes up at me then?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And didn’t you cringe on the floor like any inkspot!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And crawl away like a black snail!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And doesn’t everybody loathe you then!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And aren’t your feelings violated, you high-bred little love-bitch!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">For you’re sensitive,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In many ways very finely bred.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But bred in conceit that the world is all for love<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of you, my bitch: till you get so far you eat filth.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fool, in spite of your pretty ways, and quaint, know-all, wrinkled old aunty’s face.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_186" id="page_186">{186}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So now, what with great Airedale dogs,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And a kick or two,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And a few vomiting bouts,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And a juniper switch,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You look at me for discrimination, don’t you?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Look up at me with misgiving in your bulging eyes,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And fear in the smoky whites of your eyes, you nigger;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And you’re puzzled,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You think you’d better mind your P’s and Q’s for a bit,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Your sensitive love-pride being all hurt.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">All right, my little bitch.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">You learn loyalty rather than loving,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I’ll protect you.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Lobo.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_187" id="page_187">{187}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="MOUNTAIN_LION" id="MOUNTAIN_LION"></a>MOUNTAIN LION</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Climbing</span> through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water sounds still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Men!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Two men!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Men! The only animal in the world to fear!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They hesitate.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">We hesitate.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They have a gun.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">We have no gun.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Then we all advance, to meet.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Two Mexicans, strangers, emerging out of the dark and snow and inwardness of the Lobo valley.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">What are they doing here on this vanishing trail?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">What is he carrying?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Something yellow.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A deer?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Qué tiene, amigo?</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>León&mdash;</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He smiles, foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn’t know.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He is quite gentle and dark-faced.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_188" id="page_188">{188}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">It is a mountain lion,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A long, long slim cat, yellow like a lioness.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dead.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Lift up her face,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Her round, bright face, bright as frost.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Dark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Beautiful dead eyes.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Hermoso es!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They go out towards the open;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">We go on into the gloom of Lobo.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And above the trees I found her lair,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A hole in the blood-orange brilliant rocks that stick up, a little cave.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And bones, and twigs, and a perilous ascent.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So, she will never leap up that way again, with the yellow flash of a mountain lion’s long shoot!<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And her bright striped frost face will never watch any more, out of the shadow of the cave in the blood-orange rock,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Above the trees of the Lobo dark valley-mouth!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Instead, I look out.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And out to the dim of the desert, like a dream, never real;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_189" id="page_189">{189}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To the snow of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the ice of the mountains of Picoris,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And near across at the opposite steep of snow, green trees motionless standing in snow, like a Christmas toy.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And never miss them.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost face of that slim yellow mountain lion!<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Lobo.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_190" id="page_190">{190}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="THE_RED_WOLF" id="THE_RED_WOLF"></a>THE RED WOLF</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Over</span> the heart of the west, the Taos desert<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Circles an eagle,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And it’s dark between me and him.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The sun, as he waits a moment, huge and liquid<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Standing without feet on the rim of the far-off mesa<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Says: <i>Look for a last long time then! Look! Look well! I am going.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So he pauses and is beholden, and straightway is gone.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And the Indian, in a white sheet<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Wrapped to the eyes, the sheet bound close on his brows,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Stands saying: <i>See, I’m invisible!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Behold how you can’t behold me!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>The invisible in its shroud!</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Now that the sun has gone, and the aspen leaves<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the cotton-wood leaves are fallen, as good as fallen,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the ponies are in corral,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And it’s night.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Why, more has gone than all these;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And something has come.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A red wolf stands on the shadow’s dark red rim.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Day has gone to dust on the sage-grey desert<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a white Christus fallen to dust from a cross;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To dust, to ash, on the twilit floor of the desert.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_191" id="page_191">{191}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And a black crucifix like a dead tree spreading wings;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Maybe a black eagle with its wings out<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Left lonely in the night<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In a sort of worship.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And coming down upon us, out of the dark concave<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of the eagle’s wings,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the coffin-like slit where the Indians’ eyes are,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the absence of cotton-wood leaves, or of aspen,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Even the absence of dark-crossed donkeys:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Come tall old demons, smiling<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The Indian smile,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Saying: <i>How do you do, you pale-face?</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I am very well, old demon.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">How are you?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Call me Harry if you will,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Call me Old Harry says he.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Or the abbreviation of Nicolas,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Nick. Old Nick, maybe.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Well, you’re a dark old demon,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And I’m a pale-face like a homeless dog<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That has followed the sun from the dawn through the east<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Trotting east and east and east till the sun himself went home,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And left me homeless here in the dark at your door.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">How do you think we’ll get on,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Old demon, you and I?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>You and I, you pale-face,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Pale-face you and I</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Don’t get on.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_192" id="page_192">{192}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Mightn’t we try?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Where’s your God, you white one?</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Where’s your white God?</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">He fell to dust as the twilight fell,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Was fume as I trod<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The last step out of the east.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Then you’re a lost white dog of a pale-face,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>And the days now dead....</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Touch me carefully, old father,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">My beard is red.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Thin red wolf of a pale-face,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Thin red wolf, go home.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I have no home, old father,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That’s why I come.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>We take no hungry stray from the pale-face ...</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Father, you are not asked.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I am come. I am here. The red-dawn-wolf<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Sniffs round your place.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Lifts up his voice and howls to the walls of the pueblo,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Announcing he’s here.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>The dogs of the dark pueblo</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Have long fangs ...</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Has the red wolf trotted east and east and east<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From the far, far other end of the day<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To fear a few fangs?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_193" id="page_193">{193}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Across the pueblo river<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That dark old demon and I<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Thus say a few words to each other<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And wolf, he calls me, and red.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I call him no names.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">He says, however, he is Star-Road.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I say, he can go back the same gait.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">As for me ...<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Since I trotted at the tail of the sun as far as ever the creature went west,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And lost him here,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I’m going to sit down on my tail right here<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And wait for him to come back with a new story.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I’m the red wolf, says the dark old father.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">All right, the red dawn wolf I am.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taos.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_195" id="page_195">{195}</a></span><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_194" id="page_194">{194}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_196" id="page_196">{196}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_197" id="page_197">{197}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
-
-<h2><a name="GHOSTS" id="GHOSTS"></a>GHOSTS</h2>
-
-<h3><a name="MEN_IN_NEW_MEXICO" id="MEN_IN_NEW_MEXICO"></a>MEN IN NEW MEXICO</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Mountains</span> blanket-wrapped<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Round a white hearth of desert&mdash;<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">While the sun goes round<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And round and round the desert,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The mountains never get up and walk about.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They can’t, they can’t wake.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They camped and went to sleep<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In the last twilight<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of Indian gods;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And they can’t wake.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Indians dance and run and stamp&mdash;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No good.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">White men make gold-mines and the mountains unmake them<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In their sleep.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The Indians laugh in their sleep<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">From fear,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like a man when he sleeps and his sleep is over, and he can’t wake up,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And he lies like a log and screams and his scream is silent<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Because his body can’t wake up;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So he laughs from fear, pure fear, in the grip of the sleep.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">A dark membrane over the will, holding a man down<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Even when the mind has flickered awake;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A membrane of sleep, like a black blanket.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_198" id="page_198">{198}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">We walk in our sleep, in this land,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Somnambulist wide-eyed afraid.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">We scream for someone to wake us<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And our scream is soundless in the paralysis of sleep,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And we know it.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The Penitentes lash themselves till they run with blood<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In their efforts to come awake for one moment;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To tear the membrane of this sleep ...<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No good.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The Indians thought the white man would awake them ...<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And instead, the white men scramble asleep in the mountains,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And ride on horseback asleep forever through the desert,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And shoot one another, amazed and mad with somnambulism,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Thinking death will awaken something ...<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">No good.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Born with a caul,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A black membrane over the face,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And unable to tear it,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Though the mind is awake.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Mountains blanket-wrapped<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Round the ash-white hearth of the desert;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And though the sun leaps like a thing unleashed in the sky<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They can’t get up, they are under the blanket.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taos.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_199" id="page_199">{199}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="AUTUMN_AT_TAOS" id="AUTUMN_AT_TAOS"></a>AUTUMN AT TAOS</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Over</span> the rounded sides of the Rockies, the aspens of autumn,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The aspens of autumn,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Like yellow hair of a tigress brindled with pins.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Down on my hearth-rug of desert, sage of the mesa,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">An ash-grey pelt<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Of wolf all hairy and level, a wolf’s wild pelt.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Trot-trot to the mottled foot-hills, cedar-mottled and piñon;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Did you ever see an otter?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Silvery-sided, fish-fanged, fierce-faced whiskered, mottled.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">When I trot my little pony through the aspen-trees of the canyon,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Behold me trotting at ease betwixt the slopes of the golden<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Great and glistening-feathered legs of the hawk of Horus;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The golden hawk of Horus<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Astride above me.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But under the pines<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I go slowly<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As under the hairy belly of a great black bear.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Glad to emerge and look back<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On the yellow, pointed aspen-trees laid one on another like feathers,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Feather over feather on the breast of the great and golden<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Hawk as I say of Horus.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_200" id="page_200">{200}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Pleased to be out in the sage and the pine fish-dotted foothills,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Past the otter’s whiskers,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On to the fur of the wolf-pelt that strews the plain.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And then to look back to the rounded sides of the squatting Rockies,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Tigress brindled with aspen<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Jaguar-splashed, puma-yellow, leopard-livid slopes of America.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Make big eyes, little pony<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">At all these skins of wild beasts;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">They won’t hurt you.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Fangs and claws and talons and beaks and hawk-eyes<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Are nerveless just now.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">So be easy.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taos.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_201" id="page_201">{201}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h3><a name="SPIRITS_SUMMONED_WEST" id="SPIRITS_SUMMONED_WEST"></a>SPIRITS SUMMONED WEST</h3>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">England</span> seems full of graves to me,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Full of graves.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Women I loved and cherished, like my mother;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Yet I had to tell them to die.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">England seems covered with graves to me,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Women’s graves.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Women who were gentle<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And who loved me<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And whom I loved<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And told to die.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Women with the beautiful eyes of the old days,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Belief in love, and sorrow of such belief.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">“<i>Hush, my love, then, hush.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Hush, and die, my dear!</i>”<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Women of the older generation, who knew<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The full doom of loving and not being able to take back.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who understood at last what it was to be told to die.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Now that the graves are made, and covered;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now that in England pansies and such-like grow on the graves of women;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now that in England is silence, where before was a moving of soft-skirted women,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_202" id="page_202">{202}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Women with eyes that were gentle in olden belief in love;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now then that all their yearning is hushed, and covered over with earth.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">England seems like one grave to me.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">And I, I sit on this high American desert<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With dark-wrapped Rocky Mountains motionless squatting around in a ring,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Remembering I told them to die, to sink into the grave in England,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The gentle-kneed women.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So now I whisper: <i>Come away,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Come away from the place of graves, come west,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Women,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Women whom I loved and told to die.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Come back to me now,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Now the divided yearning is over;</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Now you are husbandless indeed, no more husband to cherish like a child</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>And wrestle with for the prize of perfect love.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>No more children to launch in a world you mistrust.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Now you need know in part</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>No longer, or carry the burden of a man on your heart,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Or the burden of Man writ large.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Now you are disemburdened of Man and a man</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Come back to me.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Now you are free of the toils of a would-be-perfect love</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Come to me and be still.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_203" id="page_203">{203}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Come back then, you who were wives and mothers<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And always virgins<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Overlooked.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Come back then, mother, my love, whom I told to die.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">It was only I who saw the virgin you<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That had no home.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The overlooked virgin,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">My love.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">You overlooked her too.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Now that the grave is made of mother and wife,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Now that the grave is made and lidded over with turf.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Come, delicate, overlooked virgin, come back to me</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>And be still,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Be glad.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">I didn’t tell you to die, for nothing.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">I wanted the virgin you to be home at last<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In my heart.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Inside my innermost heart,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Where the virgin in woman comes home to a man.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The homeless virgin<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who never in all her life could find the way home<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">To that difficult innermost place in a man.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Now come west, come home,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Women I’ve loved for gentleness,</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_204" id="page_204">{204}</a></span><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>For the virginal you.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Find the way now that you never could find in life,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>So I told you to die.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Virginal first and last<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Is woman.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Now at this last, my love, my many a love,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>You whom I loved for gentleness,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Come home to me.</i><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">They are many, and I loved them, shall always love them,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And they know it,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The virgins.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And my heart is glad to have them at last.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Now that the wife and mother and mistress is buried in earth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">In English earth,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Come home to me, my love, my loves, my many loves,</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Come west to me</i>.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">For virgins are not exclusive of virgins<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">As wives are of wives;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And motherhood is jealous,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">But in virginity jealousy does not enter.<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Taos.</i><br /></span>
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_205" id="page_205">{205}</a></span></div></div>
-</div>
-
-<h2><a name="THE_AMERICAN_EAGLE" id="THE_AMERICAN_EAGLE"></a>THE AMERICAN EAGLE</h2>
-
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">The</span> dove of Liberty sat on an egg<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And hatched another eagle.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But didn’t disown the bird.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0"><i>Down with all eagles!</i> cooed the Dove.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And down all eagles began to flutter, reeling from their perches:<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Eagles with two heads, eagles with one, presently eagles with none<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fell from the hooks and were dead.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Till the American Eagle was the only eagle left in the world.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Then it began to fidget, shifting from one leg to the other,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Trying to look like a pelican,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And plucking out of his plumage a few loose feathers to feather the nests of all<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">The new naked little republics come into the world.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">But the feathers were, comparatively, a mere flea-bite.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the bub-eagle that Liberty had hatched was growing a startling big bird<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">On the roof of the world;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">A bit awkward, and with a funny squawk in his voice,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">His mother Liberty trying always to teach him to coo<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And him always ending with a yawp<br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><i>Coo! Coo! Coo! Coo-ark! Coo-ark! Quark!! Quark!!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Yawp!!!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_206" id="page_206">{206}</a></span></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So he clears his throat, the young Cock-eagle!<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Now if the lilies of France lick Solomon in all his glory;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And the leopard cannot change his spots;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Nor the British lion his appetite;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Neither can a young Cock-eagle sit simpering<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With an olive-sprig in his mouth.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">It’s not his nature.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The big bird of the Amerindian being the eagle,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Red Men still stick themselves over with bits of his fluff,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And feel absolutely IT.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">So better make up your mind, American Eagle,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Whether you’re a sucking dove, <i>Roo&mdash;coo&mdash;ooo! Quark! Yawp!!</i><br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or a pelican<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Handing out a few loose golden breast-feathers, at moulting time;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Or a sort of prosperity-gander<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Fathering endless ten-dollar golden eggs.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Or whether it actually is an eagle you are,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">With a Roman nose<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And claws not made to shake hands with,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And a Me-Almighty eye.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">The new Proud Republic<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Based on the mystery of pride.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Overweening men, full of power of life, commanding a teeming obedience.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_207" id="page_207">{207}</a></span><br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Eagle of the Rockies, bird of men that are masters,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Lifting the rabbit-blood of the myriads up into something splendid,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Leaving a few bones;<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Opening great wings in the face of the sheep-faced ewe<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Who is losing her lamb,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Drinking a little blood, and loosing another royalty unto the world.<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Is that you, American Eagle?<br /></span>
-</div><div class="stanza">
-<span class="i0">Or are you the goose that lays the golden egg?<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Which is just a stone to anyone asking for meat.<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">And are you going to go on for ever<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">Laying that golden egg,<br /></span>
-<span class="i0">That addled golden egg?<br /></span>
-<span class="i15"><i>Lobo.</i><br /></span>
-</div></div>
-</div>
-
-<hr class="full" />
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
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author	nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org>	2025-01-27 11:07:52 -0800
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