Chapter III: Part 3

And as for love:
With a needle of long red flint he stabs in the dark
At the living rock he is up against;
While she with her goaty mouth stands smiling the while as he strikes, since sure
He will never _quite_ strike home, on the target-quick, for her quick
Is just beyond range of the arrow he shoots
From his leap at the zenith in her, so it falls just short of the mark,
far enough.
It is over before it is finished.
She, smiling with goaty munch-mouth, Mona Lisa, arranges it so.
Orgasm after orgasm after orgasm
And he smells so rank and his nose goes back,
And never an enemy brow-metalled to thresh it out with in the open field;
Never a mountain peak, to be king of the castle.
Only those eternal females to overleap and surpass, and never succeed.

The involved voluptuousness of the soft-footed cat
Who is like a fur folding a fur,
The cat who laps blood, and knows
The soft welling of blood invincible even beyond bone or metal of bone.

The soft, the secret, the unfathomable blood
The cat has lapped
And known it subtler than frisson-shaken nerves,
Stronger than multiplicity of bone on bone
And darker than even the arrows of violentest will
Can pierce, for that is where will gives out, like a sinking stone that
can sink no further.

But he-goat,
Black procreant male of the selfish will and libidinous desire,
God in black cloud with curving horns of bronze,
Find an enemy, Egoist, and clash the cymbals in face-to-face defiance,
And let the lightning out of your smothered dusk.

Forget the female herd for a bit,
And fight to be boss of the world.
Fight, old Satan with a selfish will, fight for your selfish will;
Fight to be the devil on the tip of the peak
Overlooking the world for his own.

But bah, how can he, poor domesticated beast!
_Taormina._

SHE-GOAT

Goats go past the back of the house like dry leaves in the dawn,
And up the hill like a river, if you watch.

At dusk they patter back like a bough being dragged on the ground,
Raising dusk and acridity of goats, and bleating.

Our old goat we tie up at night in the shed at the back of the broken Greek
tomb in the garden,
And when the herd goes by at dawn she begins to bleat for me to come down
and untie her.

_Merr--err--err! Merr--er--errr! Mer! Mé!_
_Wait, wait a bit, I’ll come when I’ve lit the fire._
_Merrr!_
_Exactly._
_Mé! Mer! Merrrrrrr!!!_
_Tace, tu, crapa, bestia!_
_Merr-ererrr-ererrrr! Merrrr!_

She is such an alert listener, with her ears wide, to know am I coming!
Such a canny listener, from a distance, looking upwards, lending first one
ear, then another.

There she is, perched on her manger, looking over the boards into the day
Like a belle at her window.

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.

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.
But she puts her nose down shrewdly enough when the knot is untied,
And jumps staccato to earth, a sharp, dry jump, still ignoring me,
Pretending to look round the stall.

_Come on, you, crapa! I’m not your servant!_

She turns her head away with an obtuse, female sort of deafness, bête.
And then invariably she crouches her rear and makes water.
That being her way of answer, if I speak to her.--Self-conscious!
_Le bestie non parlano, poverine!_

She was bought at Giardini fair, on the sands, for six hundred lire.

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.
Yet the moment I hate her she trips mild and smug like a woman going to
mass.
The moment I really detest her.

Queer it is, suddenly, in the garden
To catch sight of her standing like some huge, ghoulish grey bird in
the air, on the bough of the leaning almond-tree,
Straight as a board on the bough, looking down like some hairy horrid God
the Father in a William Blake imagination.
_Come down, crapa, out of that almond tree!_

Instead of which she strangely rears on her perch in the air, vast beast,
And strangely paws the air, delicate,
And reaches her black-striped face up like a snake, far up,
Subtly, to the twigs overhead, far up, vast beast,
And snaps them sharp, with a little twist of her anaconda head;
All her great hairy-shaggy belly open against the morning.

At seasons she curls back her tail like a green leaf in the fire,
Or like a lifted hand, hailing at her wrong end.
And having exposed the pink place of her nakedness, fixedly,
She trots on blithe toes,
And if you look at her, she looks back with a cold, sardonic stare.
Sardonic, sardonyx, rock of cold fire.
_See me?_ She says, _That’s me!_

That’s her.

Then she leaps the rocks like a quick rock,
Her back-bone sharp as a rock,
Sheer will.

Along which ridge of libidinous magnetism
Defiant, curling the leaf of her tail as if she were curling her lip behind
her at all life,
Libidinous desire runs back and forth, asserting itself in that little lifted bare hand.

Yet she has such adorable spurty kids, like spurts of black ink.
And in a month again is as if she had never had them.

And when the billy goat mounts her
She is brittle as brimstone.
While his slitted eyes squint back to the roots of his ears.
_Taormina._

ELEPHANT

You go down shade to the river, where naked men sit on flat brown rocks, to
watch the ferry, in the sun;
And you cross the ferry with the naked people, go up the tropical lane
Through the palm-trees and past hollow paddy-fields where naked men are
threshing rice
And the monolithic water-buffaloes, like old, muddy stones with hair on
them, are being idle;
And through the shadow of bread-fruit trees, with their dark green, glossy,
fanged leaves
Very handsome, and some pure yellow fanged leaves;
Out into the open, where the path runs on the top of a dyke between paddy-fields:
And there, of course, you meet a huge and mud-grey elephant advancing his
frontal bone, his trunk curled round a log of wood:
So you step down the bank, to make way.

Shuffle, shuffle, and his little wicked eye has seen you as he advances
above you,
The slow beast curiously spreading his round feet for the dust.
And the slim naked man slips down, and the beast deposits the lump of wood,
carefully.
The keeper hooks the vast knee, the creature salaams.

White man, you are saluted.
Pay a few cents.

But the best is the Pera-hera, at midnight, under the tropical stars,
With a pale little wisp of a Prince of Wales, diffident, up in a small
pagoda on the temple side
And white people in evening dress buzzing and crowding the stand upon the
grass below and opposite:
And at last the Pera-hera procession, flambeaux aloft in the tropical
night, of blazing cocoa-nut,
Naked dark men beneath,
And the huge frontal of three great elephants stepping forth to the
tom-tom’s beat, in the torch-light,
Slowly sailing in gorgeous apparel through the flame-light, in front of
a towering, grimacing white image of wood.

The elephant bells striking slow, tong-tong, tong-tong,
To music and queer chanting:
Enormous shadow-processions filing on in the flare of fire
In the fume of cocoa-nut oil, in the sweating tropical night,
In the noise of the tom-toms and singers;
Elephants after elephants curl their trunks, vast shadows, and some cry
out
As they approach and salaam, under the dripping fire of the torches
That pale fragment of a Prince up there, whose motto is _Ich dien_.

Pale, dispirited Prince, with his chin on his hands, his nerves tired out,
Watching and hardly seeing the trunk-curl approach and clumsy, knee-lifting
salaam
Of the hugest, oldest of beasts in the night and the fire-flare below.
He is royalty, pale and dejected fragment up aloft.
And down below huge homage of shadowy beasts; barefoot and trunk-lipped
in the night.

Chieftains, three of them abreast, on foot
Strut like peg-tops, wound around with hundreds of yards of fine linen.
They glimmer with tissue of gold, and golden threads on a jacket of velvet,
And their faces are dark, and fat, and important.

They are royalty, dark-faced royalty, showing the conscious whites of their
eyes
And stepping in homage, stubborn, to that nervous pale lad up there.

More elephants, tong, tong-tong, loom up,
Huge, more tassels swinging, more dripping fire of new cocoa-nut cressets
High, high flambeaux, smoking of the east;
And scarlet hot embers of torches knocked out of the sockets among bare
feet of elephants and men on the path in the dark.
And devil dancers luminous with sweat, dancing on to the shudder of drums,
Tom-toms, weird music of the devil, voices of men from the jungle singing;
Endless, under the Prince.

Towards the tail of the everlasting procession
In the long hot night, mere dancers from insignificant villages,
And smaller, more frightened elephants.
Men-peasants from jungle villages dancing and running with sweat and laughing,
Naked dark men with ornaments on, on their naked arms and their naked
breasts, the grooved loins
Gleaming like metal with running sweat as they suddenly turn, feet apart,
And dance, and dance, forever dance, with breath half sobbing in dark, sweat-shining breasts,
And lustrous great tropical eyes unveiled now, gleaming a kind of laugh,
A naked, gleaming dark laugh, like a secret out in the dark,
And flare of a tropical energy, tireless, afire in the dark, slim limbs
and breasts,
Perpetual, fire-laughing motion, among the slow shuffle
Of elephants,
The hot dark blood of itself a-laughing, wet, half-devilish, men all motion
Approaching under that small pavilion, and tropical eyes dilated look up
Inevitably look up
To the Prince
To that tired remnant of royalty up there
Whose motto is _Ich dien_.

As if the homage of the kindled blood of the east
Went up in wavelets to him, from the breasts and eyes of jungle torch-men,
And he couldn’t take it.

What would they do, those jungle men running with sweat, with the strange
dark laugh in their eyes, glancing up,
And the sparse-haired elephants slowly following,
If they knew that his motto was _Ich dien_?
And that he meant it.

They begin to understand
The rickshaw boys begin to understand
And then the devil comes into their faces,
But a different sort, a cold, rebellious, jeering devil.

In elephants and the east are two devils, in all men maybe.
The mystery of the dark mountain of blood, reeking in homage, in lust, in
rage,
And passive with everlasting patience,
Then the little, cunning pig-devil of the elephant’s lurking eyes, the unbeliever.

We dodged, when the Pera-hera was finished, under the hanging, hairy
pigs’ tails
And the flat, flaccid mountains of the elephants’ standing haunches,
Vast-blooded beasts,
Myself so little dodging rather scared against the eternal wrinkled pillars
of their legs, as they were being dismantled;
Then I knew they were dejected, having come to hear the repeated
Royal summons: _Dient Ihr!_
_Serve!_
_Serve, vast mountainous blood, in submission and splendour, serve royalty._
Instead of which, the silent, fatal emission from that pale, shattered boy
up there:
_Ich dien._

That’s why the night fell in frustration.
That’s why, as the elephants ponderously, with unseeming swiftness, galloped
uphill in the night, going back to the jungle villages,
As the elephant bells sounded tong-tong-tong, bell of the temple of blood
in the night, swift-striking,
And the crowd like a field of rice in the dark gave way like liquid to the
dark
Looming gallop of the beasts,
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,
Their bells sounding frustrate and sinister.

And all the dark-faced, cotton-wrapped people, more numerous and whispering
than grains of rice in a ricefield at night,
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,
Waiting for the fireworks of the after-show,
As the rockets went up, and the glare passed over countless faces, dark
as black rice growing,
Showing a glint of teeth, and glancing tropical eyes aroused in the night,
There was the faintest twist of mockery in every face, across the hiss of
wonders as the rocket burst
High, high up, in flakes, shimmering flakes of blue fire, above the palm-trees
of the islet in the lake,
O faces upturned to the glare, O tropical wonder, wonder, a miracle in heaven!
And the shadow of a jeer, of underneath disappointment, as the rocket-coruscation
died, and shadow was the same as before.

They were foiled, the myriad whispering dark-faced cotton-wrapped people.
They had come to see royalty,
To bow before royalty, in the land of elephants, bow deep, bow deep.
Bow deep, for it’s good as a draught of cool water to bow very, very low to
the royal.

And all there was to bow to, a weary, diffident boy whose motto is _Ich
dien_.
_I serve! I serve!_ in all the weary iron of his mien--_’Tis I who serve!_
Drudge to the public.

I wish they had given the three feathers to me;
That I had been he in the pavilion, as in a pepper-box aloft and alone
To stand and hold feathers, three feathers above the world,
And say to them: _Dient Ihr! Dient!_
_Omnes, vos omnes, servite._
_Serve me, I am meet to be served._
_Being royal of the gods._

And to the elephants:
_First great beasts of the earth
A prince has come back to you,
Blood-mountains.
Crook the knee and be glad._
_Kandy._

KANGAROO

In the northern hemisphere
Life seems to leap at the air, or skim under the wind
Like stags on rocky ground, or pawing horses, or springy scut-tailed rabbits.

Or else rush horizontal to charge at the sky’s horizon,
Like bulls or bisons or wild pigs.

Or slip like water slippery towards its ends,
As foxes, stoats, and wolves, and prairie dogs.

Only mice, and moles, and rats, and badgers, and beavers, and perhaps bears
Seem belly-plumbed to the earth’s mid-navel.
Or frogs that when they leap come flop, and flop to the centre of the earth.

But the yellow antipodal Kangaroo, when she sits up,
Who can unseat her, like a liquid drop that is heavy, and just touches earth.

The downward drip.
The down-urge.
So much denser than cold-blooded frogs.

Delicate mother Kangaroo
Sitting up there rabbit-wise, but huge, plumb-weighted,
And lifting her beautiful slender face, oh! so much more gently and finely
lined than a rabbit’s, or than a hare’s,
Lifting her face to nibble at a round white peppermint drop,
which she loves, sensitive mother Kangaroo.

Her sensitive, long, pure-bred face.
Her full antipodal eyes, so dark,
So big and quiet and remote, having watched so many empty dawns in silent
Australia.

Her little loose hands, and drooping Victorian shoulders.
And then her great weight below the waist, her vast pale belly
With a thin young yellow little paw hanging out, and straggle of a long
thin ear, like ribbon,
Like a funny trimming to the middle of her belly, thin little dangle of
an immature paw, and one thin ear.

Her belly, her big haunches
And in addition, the great muscular python-stretch of her tail.

There, she shan’t have any more peppermint drops.
So she wistfully, sensitively sniffs the air, and then turns, goes off in
slow sad leaps

On the long flat skis of her legs,
Steered and propelled by that steel-strong snake of a tail.

Stops again, half turns, inquisitive to look back.
While something stirs quickly in her belly, and a lean little face comes
out, as from a window,
Peaked and a bit dismayed,
Only to disappear again quickly away from the sight of the world, to
snuggle down in the warmth,
Leaving the trail of a different paw hanging out.

Still she watches with eternal, cocked wistfulness!
How full her eyes are, like the full, fathomless, shining eyes of an
Australian black-boy
Who has been lost so many centuries on the margins of existence!

She watches with insatiable wistfulness.
Untold centuries of watching for something to come,
For a new signal from life, in that silent lost land of the South.

Where nothing bites but insects and snakes and the sun, small life.
Where no bull roared, no cow ever lowed, no stag cried, no leopard
screeched, no lion coughed, no dog barked,
But all was silent save for parrots occasionally, in the haunted blue bush.

Wistfully watching, with wonderful liquid eyes.
And all her weight, all her blood, dripping sack-wise down towards the
earth’s centre,
And the live little one taking in its paw at the door of her belly.

Leap then, and come down on the line that draws to the earth’s deep, heavy
centre.
_Sydney_

BIBBLES

Bibbles
Little black dog in New Mexico,
Little black snub-nosed bitch with a shoved-out jaw
And a wrinkled reproachful look;
Little black female pup, sort of French bull, they say,
With bits of brindle coming through, like rust, to show you’re not pure;
Not pure, Bibbles,
Bubsey, bat-eared dog;
Not black enough!

First live thing I’ve “owned” since the lop-eared rabbits when I was a lad,
And those over-prolific white mice, and Adolf, and Rex whom I didn’t own.
And even now, Bibbles, little Ma’am, it’s you who appropriated me, not I you.
As Benjamin Franklin appropriated Providence to his purposes.

Oh Bibbles, black little bitch
I’d never have let you appropriate me, had I known.
I never dreamed, till now, of the awful time the Lord must have, “owning”
humanity,
Especially democratic live-by-love humanity.

Oh Bibbles, oh Pips, oh Pipsey
You little black love-bird!

_Don’t_ you love _everybody_!
Just everybody.
You love ’em all.
Believe in the One Identity, don’t you,
You little Walt-Whitmanesque bitch?

First time I lost you in Taos plaza,
And found you after endless chasing,
Came upon you prancing round the corner in exuberant, bibbling affection
After the black-green skirts of a yellow-green old Mexican woman
Who hated you, and kept looking round at you and cursing you in a mutter,
While you pranced and bounced with love of her, you indiscriminating animal,
All your wrinkled _miserere_ Chinese black little face beaming
And your black little body bouncing and wriggling
With indiscriminate love, Bibbles;
I had a moment’s pure detestation of you.

As I rushed like an idiot round the corner after you
Yelling: _Pips! Pips! Bibbles!_

I’ve had moments of hatred of you since,
Loving everybody!
“To you, whoever you are, with endless embrace!”--
That’s you, Pipsey,
With your imbecile bit of a tail in a love-flutter.
You omnipip.

Not that you’re merely a softy, oh dear me no.
You know which side your bread is buttered.
You don’t care a rap for anybody.
But you love lying warm between warm human thighs, indiscriminate,
And you love to make somebody love you, indiscriminate,
You love to lap up affection, to wallow in it,
And then turn tail to the next comer, for a new dollop.

And start prancing and licking and cuddling again, indiscriminate.

Oh yes, I know your little game.

Yet you’re so nice,
So quick, like a little black dragon.
So fierce, when the coyotes howl, barking like a whole little lion, and
rumbling,
And starting forward in the dusk, with your little black fur all bristling
like plush
Against those coyotes, who would swallow you like an oyster.

And in the morning, when the bedroom door is opened,
Rushing in like a little black whirlwind, leaping straight as an arrow on
the bed at the pillow
And turning the day suddenly into a black tornado of _joie de vivre_, Chinese dragon.

So funny
Lobbing wildly through deep snow like a rabbit,
Hurtling like a black ball through the snow,
Champing it, tossing a mouthful,
Little black spot in the landscape!

So absurd
Pelting behind on the dusty trail when the horse sets off home at a gallop:
Left in the dust behind like a dust-ball tearing along
Coming up on fierce little legs, tearing fast to catch up, a real little
dust-pig, ears almost blown away,
And black eyes bulging bright in a dust-mask
Chinese-dragon-wrinkled, with a pink mouth grinning, under jaw shoved out
And white teeth showing in your dragon-grin as you race, you split-face,
Like a trundling projectile swiftly whirling up,
Cocking your eyes at me as you come alongside, to see if I’m I on the horse,
And panting with that split grin,
All your game little body dust-smooth like a little pig, poor Pips.

Plenty of game old spirit in you, Bibbles.
Plenty of game old spunk, little bitch.

How you hate being brushed with the boot-brush, to brush all that dust out
of your wrinkled face,
Don’t you?
How you hate being made to look undignified, Ma’am;
How you hate being laughed at, Miss Superb!

Blackberry face!

Plenty of conceit in you.
Unblemished belief in your own perfection
And utter lovableness, you ugly-mug;
Chinese puzzle-face,
Wrinkled underhung physiog that looks as if it had done with everything,
Through with everything.

Instead of which you sit there and roll your head like a canary
And show a tiny bunch of white teeth in your underhung blackness,
Self-conscious little bitch,
Aiming again at being loved.

Let the merest scallywag come to the door and you leap your very dearest-love at him,
As if now, at last, here was the one you _finally_ loved,
Finally loved;
And even the dirtiest scallywag is taken in,
Thinking: _This dog sure has taken a fancy to me_.

You miserable little bitch of love-tricks,
I know your game.

Me or the Mexican who comes to chop wood
All the same,
All humanity is jam to you.

Everybody so dear, and yourself so ultra-beloved
That you have to run out at last and eat filth,
Gobble up filth, you horror, swallow utter abomination and
fresh-dropped dung.

You stinker.
You worse than a carrion-crow.
Reeking dung-mouth.
You love-bird.

_Reject nothing_, sings Walt Whitman.
So you, you go out at last and eat the unmentionable,
In your appetite for affection.

And then you run in to vomit it in my house!
I get my love back.
And I have to clean up after you, filth which even blind Nature rejects
From the pit of your stomach;
But you, you snout-face, you reject nothing, you merge so much in love
You must eat even that.

Then when I dust you a bit with a juniper twig
You run straight away to live with somebody else,
Fawn before them, and love them as if they were the ones you had _really_
loved all along.
And they’re taken in.
They feel quite tender over you, till you play the same trick on them, dirty bitch.

Fidelity! Loyalty! Attachment!
Oh, these are abstractions to your nasty little belly.
You must always be a-waggle with LOVE.
Such a waggle of love you can hardly distinguish one human from another.
You love one after another, on one condition, that each one loves you most.
Democratic little bull-bitch, dirt-eating little swine.

But now, my lass, you’ve got your Nemesis on your track,
Now you’ve come sex-alive, and the great ranch-dogs are all after you.
They’re after what they can get, and don’t you turn tail!
You loved ’em all so much before, didn’t you, loved ’em indiscriminate.
You don’t love ’em now.
They want something of you, so you squeak and come pelting indoors.

Come pelting to me, now the other folk have found you out, and the dogs
are after you.
Oh yes, you’re found out. I heard them kick you out of the ranch house.
_Get out, you little, soft fool!!_

And didn’t you turn your eyes up at me then?
And didn’t you cringe on the floor like any inkspot!
And crawl away like a black snail!
And doesn’t everybody loathe you then!
And aren’t your feelings violated, you high-bred little love-bitch!

For you’re sensitive,
In many ways very finely bred.
But bred in conceit that the world is all for love
Of you, my bitch: till you get so far you eat filth.
Fool, in spite of your pretty ways, and quaint, know-all,
wrinkled old aunty’s face.

So now, what with great Airedale dogs,
And a kick or two,
And a few vomiting bouts,
And a juniper switch,
You look at me for discrimination, don’t you?
Look up at me with misgiving in your bulging eyes,
And fear in the smoky whites of your eyes, you nigger;
And you’re puzzled,
You think you’d better mind your P’s and Q’s for a bit,
Your sensitive love-pride being all hurt.

All right, my little bitch.
You learn loyalty rather than loving,
And I’ll protect you.
_Lobo._

MOUNTAIN LION

Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon
Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water sounds still
unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.

Men!
Two men!
Men! The only animal in the world to fear!

They hesitate.
We hesitate.
They have a gun.
We have no gun.

Then we all advance, to meet.

Two Mexicans, strangers, emerging out of the dark and snow and inwardness
of the Lobo valley.
What are they doing here on this vanishing trail?

What is he carrying?
Something yellow.
A deer?

_Qué tiene, amigo?_
_León--_

He smiles, foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong.
And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn’t know.
He is quite gentle and dark-faced.

It is a mountain lion,
A long, long slim cat, yellow like a lioness.
Dead.

He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.

Lift up her face,
Her round, bright face, bright as frost.
Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;
And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays,
Dark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face.
Beautiful dead eyes.

_Hermoso es!_

They go out towards the open;
We go on into the gloom of Lobo.
And above the trees I found her lair,
A hole in the blood-orange brilliant rocks that stick up, a little cave.
And bones, and twigs, and a perilous ascent.

So, she will never leap up that way again, with the yellow
flash of a mountain lion’s long shoot!
And her bright striped frost face will never watch any more, out of the
shadow of the cave in the blood-orange rock,
Above the trees of the Lobo dark valley-mouth!

Instead, I look out.
And out to the dim of the desert, like a dream, never real;
To the snow of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the ice of the mountains
of Picoris,
And near across at the opposite steep of snow, green trees motionless
standing in snow, like a Christmas toy.

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or
two of humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost face of that
slim yellow mountain lion!
_Lobo._

THE RED WOLF

Over the heart of the west, the Taos desert
Circles an eagle,
And it’s dark between me and him.

The sun, as he waits a moment, huge and liquid
Standing without feet on the rim of the far-off mesa
Says: _Look for a last long time then! Look! Look well! I am going._
So he pauses and is beholden, and straightway is gone.

And the Indian, in a white sheet
Wrapped to the eyes, the sheet bound close on his brows,
Stands saying: _See, I’m invisible!_
_Behold how you can’t behold me!_
_The invisible in its shroud!_

Now that the sun has gone, and the aspen leaves
And the cotton-wood leaves are fallen, as good as fallen,
And the ponies are in corral,
And it’s night.

Why, more has gone than all these;
And something has come.
A red wolf stands on the shadow’s dark red rim.

Day has gone to dust on the sage-grey desert
Like a white Christus fallen to dust from a cross;
To dust, to ash, on the twilit floor of the desert.

And a black crucifix like a dead tree spreading wings;
Maybe a black eagle with its wings out
Left lonely in the night
In a sort of worship.

And coming down upon us, out of the dark concave
Of the eagle’s wings,
And the coffin-like slit where the Indians’ eyes are,
And the absence of cotton-wood leaves, or of aspen,
Even the absence of dark-crossed donkeys:
Come tall old demons, smiling
The Indian smile,
Saying: _How do you do, you pale-face?_

I am very well, old demon.
How are you?

_Call me Harry if you will,_
_Call me Old Harry says he._
_Or the abbreviation of Nicolas,_
_Nick. Old Nick, maybe._

Well, you’re a dark old demon,
And I’m a pale-face like a homeless dog
That has followed the sun from the dawn through the east
Trotting east and east and east till the sun himself went home,
And left me homeless here in the dark at your door.
How do you think we’ll get on,
Old demon, you and I?

_You and I, you pale-face,_
_Pale-face you and I_
_Don’t get on._

Mightn’t we try?

_Where’s your God, you white one?_
_Where’s your white God?_

He fell to dust as the twilight fell,
Was fume as I trod
The last step out of the east.

_Then you’re a lost white dog of a pale-face,_
_And the days now dead...._

Touch me carefully, old father,
My beard is red.

_Thin red wolf of a pale-face,_
_Thin red wolf, go home._

I have no home, old father,
That’s why I come.

_We take no hungry stray from the pale-face ..._

Father, you are not asked.
I am come. I am here. The red-dawn-wolf
Sniffs round your place.
Lifts up his voice and howls to the walls of the pueblo,
Announcing he’s here.

_The dogs of the dark pueblo_
_Have long fangs ..._

Has the red wolf trotted east and east and east
From the far, far other end of the day
To fear a few fangs?

Across the pueblo river
That dark old demon and I
Thus say a few words to each other

And wolf, he calls me, and red.
I call him no names.
He says, however, he is Star-Road.
I say, he can go back the same gait.

As for me ...
Since I trotted at the tail of the sun as far as ever the creature went
west,
And lost him here,
I’m going to sit down on my tail right here
And wait for him to come back with a new story.
I’m the red wolf, says the dark old father.
All right, the red dawn wolf I am.
_Taos._

GHOSTS

MEN IN NEW MEXICO

Mountains blanket-wrapped
Round a white hearth of desert--

While the sun goes round
And round and round the desert,
The mountains never get up and walk about.
They can’t, they can’t wake.

They camped and went to sleep
In the last twilight
Of Indian gods;
And they can’t wake.

Indians dance and run and stamp--
No good.
White men make gold-mines and the mountains unmake them
In their sleep.

The Indians laugh in their sleep
From fear,
Like a man when he sleeps and his sleep is over, and he can’t wake up,
And he lies like a log and screams and his scream is silent
Because his body can’t wake up;
So he laughs from fear, pure fear, in the grip of the sleep.

A dark membrane over the will, holding a man down
Even when the mind has flickered awake;
A membrane of sleep, like a black blanket.

We walk in our sleep, in this land,
Somnambulist wide-eyed afraid.

We scream for someone to wake us
And our scream is soundless in the paralysis of sleep,
And we know it.

The Penitentes lash themselves till they run with blood
In their efforts to come awake for one moment;
To tear the membrane of this sleep ...
No good.

The Indians thought the white man would awake them ...
And instead, the white men scramble asleep in the mountains,
And ride on horseback asleep forever through the desert,
And shoot one another, amazed and mad with somnambulism,
Thinking death will awaken something ...
No good.

Born with a caul,
A black membrane over the face,
And unable to tear it,
Though the mind is awake.

Mountains blanket-wrapped
Round the ash-white hearth of the desert;
And though the sun leaps like a thing unleashed in the sky
They can’t get up, they are under the blanket.
_Taos._

AUTUMN AT TAOS

Over the rounded sides of the Rockies, the aspens of autumn,
The aspens of autumn,
Like yellow hair of a tigress brindled with pins.

Down on my hearth-rug of desert, sage of the mesa,
An ash-grey pelt
Of wolf all hairy and level, a wolf’s wild pelt.

Trot-trot to the mottled foot-hills, cedar-mottled and piñon;
Did you ever see an otter?
Silvery-sided, fish-fanged, fierce-faced whiskered, mottled.

When I trot my little pony through the aspen-trees of the canyon,
Behold me trotting at ease betwixt the slopes of the golden
Great and glistening-feathered legs of the hawk of Horus;
The golden hawk of Horus
Astride above me.

But under the pines
I go slowly
As under the hairy belly of a great black bear.

Glad to emerge and look back
On the yellow, pointed aspen-trees laid one on another like feathers,
Feather over feather on the breast of the great and golden
Hawk as I say of Horus.

Pleased to be out in the sage and the pine fish-dotted foothills,
Past the otter’s whiskers,
On to the fur of the wolf-pelt that strews the plain.

And then to look back to the rounded sides of the squatting Rockies,
Tigress brindled with aspen
Jaguar-splashed, puma-yellow, leopard-livid slopes of America.

Make big eyes, little pony
At all these skins of wild beasts;
They won’t hurt you.

Fangs and claws and talons and beaks and hawk-eyes
Are nerveless just now.
So be easy.
_Taos._

SPIRITS SUMMONED WEST

England seems full of graves to me,
Full of graves.

Women I loved and cherished, like my mother;
Yet I had to tell them to die.

England seems covered with graves to me,
Women’s graves.

Women who were gentle
And who loved me
And whom I loved
And told to die.

Women with the beautiful eyes of the old days,
Belief in love, and sorrow of such belief.
“_Hush, my love, then, hush._
_Hush, and die, my dear!_”

Women of the older generation, who knew
The full doom of loving and not being able to take back.
Who understood at last what it was to be told to die.

Now that the graves are made, and covered;
Now that in England pansies and such-like grow on the graves of women;
Now that in England is silence, where before was a moving of soft-skirted
women,
Women with eyes that were gentle in olden belief in love;
Now then that all their yearning is hushed, and covered over with earth.

England seems like one grave to me.

And I, I sit on this high American desert
With dark-wrapped Rocky Mountains motionless squatting around in a ring,
Remembering I told them to die, to sink into the grave in England,
The gentle-kneed women.

So now I whisper: _Come away,_
_Come away from the place of graves, come west,_
_Women,_
_Women whom I loved and told to die._

_Come back to me now,_
_Now the divided yearning is over;_
_Now you are husbandless indeed, no more husband to cherish like a child_
_And wrestle with for the prize of perfect love._
_No more children to launch in a world you mistrust._
_Now you need know in part_
_No longer, or carry the burden of a man on your heart,_
_Or the burden of Man writ large._

_Now you are disemburdened of Man and a man_
_Come back to me._
_Now you are free of the toils of a would-be-perfect love_
_Come to me and be still._

Come back then, you who were wives and mothers
And always virgins
Overlooked.

Come back then, mother, my love, whom I told to die.
It was only I who saw the virgin you
That had no home.

The overlooked virgin,
My love.

You overlooked her too.

Now that the grave is made of mother and wife,
Now that the grave is made and lidded over with turf.

_Come, delicate, overlooked virgin, come back to me_
_And be still,_
_Be glad._

I didn’t tell you to die, for nothing.
I wanted the virgin you to be home at last
In my heart.

Inside my innermost heart,
Where the virgin in woman comes home to a man.

The homeless virgin
Who never in all her life could find the way home
To that difficult innermost place in a man.

_Now come west, come home,_
_Women I’ve loved for gentleness,_
_For the virginal you._
_Find the way now that you never could find in life,_
_So I told you to die._

Virginal first and last
Is woman.
_Now at this last, my love, my many a love,_
_You whom I loved for gentleness,_
_Come home to me._

They are many, and I loved them, shall always love them,
And they know it,
The virgins.
And my heart is glad to have them at last.

Now that the wife and mother and mistress is buried in earth,
In English earth,
_Come home to me, my love, my loves, my many loves,_
_Come west to me_.

For virgins are not exclusive of virgins
As wives are of wives;
And motherhood is jealous,
But in virginity jealousy does not enter.
_Taos._

THE AMERICAN EAGLE

The dove of Liberty sat on an egg
And hatched another eagle.

But didn’t disown the bird.

_Down with all eagles!_ cooed the Dove.
And down all eagles began to flutter, reeling from their perches:
Eagles with two heads, eagles with one, presently eagles with none
Fell from the hooks and were dead.

Till the American Eagle was the only eagle left in the world.

Then it began to fidget, shifting from one leg to the other,
Trying to look like a pelican,
And plucking out of his plumage a few loose feathers to feather the nests
of all
The new naked little republics come into the world.

But the feathers were, comparatively, a mere flea-bite.
And the bub-eagle that Liberty had hatched was growing a startling big bird
On the roof of the world;
A bit awkward, and with a funny squawk in his voice,
His mother Liberty trying always to teach him to coo
And him always ending with a yawp
_Coo! Coo! Coo! Coo-ark! Coo-ark! Quark!! Quark!!_
YAWP!!!

So he clears his throat, the young Cock-eagle!

Now if the lilies of France lick Solomon in all his glory;
And the leopard cannot change his spots;
Nor the British lion his appetite;
Neither can a young Cock-eagle sit simpering
With an olive-sprig in his mouth.

It’s not his nature.

The big bird of the Amerindian being the eagle,
Red Men still stick themselves over with bits of his fluff,
And feel absolutely IT.

So better make up your mind, American Eagle,
Whether you’re a sucking dove, _Roo--coo--ooo! Quark! Yawp!!_
Or a pelican
Handing out a few loose golden breast-feathers, at moulting time;
Or a sort of prosperity-gander
Fathering endless ten-dollar golden eggs.

Or whether it actually is an eagle you are,
With a Roman nose
And claws not made to shake hands with,
And a Me-Almighty eye.

The new Proud Republic
Based on the mystery of pride.
Overweening men, full of power of life, commanding a teeming obedience.

Eagle of the Rockies, bird of men that are masters,
Lifting the rabbit-blood of the myriads up into something splendid,
Leaving a few bones;
Opening great wings in the face of the sheep-faced ewe
Who is losing her lamb,
Drinking a little blood, and loosing another royalty unto the world.

Is that you, American Eagle?

Or are you the goose that lays the golden egg?
Which is just a stone to anyone asking for meat.
And are you going to go on for ever
Laying that golden egg,
That addled golden egg?
_Lobo._

End of Project Gutenberg's Birds, Beasts and Flowers, by D. H. Lawrence