Before anything had a soul,

  While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,

  This little bit chipped off in brilliance

  And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

  I believe there were no flowers, then

  In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of

  creation.

  I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long

  beak.

  Probably he was big

  As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.

  Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.

  We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope

  of Time,

  Luckily for us.

  Española.

  EAGLE IN NEW MEXICO

  TOWARDS the sun, towards the south-west

  A scorched breast.

  A scorched breast, breasting the sun like an answer,

  Like a retort.

  An eagle at the top of a low cedar-bush

  On the sage-ash desert

  Reflecting the scorch of the sun from his breast;

  Eagle, with the sickle dripping darkly above.

  Erect, scorched-pallid out of the hair of the cedar,

  Erect, with the god-thrust entering him from below,

  Eagle gloved in feathers

  In scorched white feathers

  In burnt dark feathers

  In feathers still fire-rusted;

  Sickle-overswept, sickle dripping over and above.

  Sun-breaster,

  Staring two ways at once, to right and left;

  Masked-one

  Dark-visaged

  Sickle-masked

  With iron between your two eyes;

  You feather-gloved

  To the feet;

  Foot-fierce;

  Erect one;

  The god-thrust entering you steadily from below.

  You never look at the sun with your two eyes.

  Only the inner eye of your scorched broad breast

  Looks straight at the sun.

  You are dark

  Except scorch-pale-breasted;

  And dark cleaves down and weapon-hard downward curving

  At your scorched breast,

  Like a sword of Damocles,

  Beaked eagle.

  You’ve dipped it in blood so many times

  That dark face-weapon, to temper it well,

  Blood-thirsty bird.

  Why do you front the sun so obstinately,

  American eagle?

  As if you owed him an old old grudge, great sun: or an old,

  old allegiance.

  When you pick the red smoky heart from a rabbit or a light —

  blooded bird

  Do you lift it to the sun, as the Aztec priests used to lift

  red hearts of men?

  Does the sun need steam of blood do you think

  In America, still,

  Old eagle?

  Does the sun in New Mexico sail like a fiery bird of prey in

  the sky

  Hovering?

  Does he shriek for blood?

  Does he fan great wings above the prairie, like a hovering,

  blood-thirsty bird?

  And are you his priest, big eagle

  Whom the Indians aspire to?

  Is there a bond of bloodshed between you?

  Is your continent cold from the ice-age still, that the sun is

  so angry?

  Is the blood of your continent somewhat reptilian still,

  That the sun should be greedy for it?

  I don’t yield to you, big, jowl-faced eagle.

  Nor you nor your blood-thirsty sun

  That sucks up blood

  Leaving a nervous people.

  Fly off, big bird with a big black back,

  Fly slowly away, with a rust of fire in your tail,

  Dark as you are on your dark side, eagle of heaven.

  Even the sun in heaven can be curbed and chastened at last

  By the life in the hearts of men.

  And you, great bird, sun-starer, heavy black beak

  Can be put out of office as sacrifice bringer.

  Taos.

  THE BLUE JAY

  The blue jay with a crest on his head

  Comes round the cabin in the snow.

  He runs in the snow like a bit of blue metal,

  Turning his back on everything.

  From the pine-tree that towers and hisses like a pillar of

  shaggy cloud

  Immense above the cabin

  Comes a strident laugh as we approach, this little black dog

  and I.

  So halts the little black bitch on four spread paws in the snow

  And looks up inquiringly into the pillar of cloud,

  With a tinge of misgiving.

  Ca-a-a! comes the scrape of ridicule out of the tree.

  What voice of the Lord is that, from the tree of smoke?

  Oh Bibbles, little black bitch in the snow,

  With a pinch of snow in the groove of your silly snub nose.

  What do you look at me for?

  What do you look at me for, with such misgiving?

  It’s the blue jay laughing at us.

  It’s the blue jay jeering at us, Bibs.

  Every day since the snow is here

  The blue jay paces round the cabin, very busy, picking up

  bits,

  Turning his back on us all,

  And bobbing his thick dark crest about the snow, as if

  darkly saying:

  I ignore those folk who look out.

  You acid-blue metallic bird,

  You thick bird with a strong crest

  Who are you?

  Whose boss are you, with all your bully way?

  You copper-sulphate blue-bird!

  Lobo.

  ANIMALS

  THE ASS

  THE long-drawn bray of the ass

  In the Sicilian twilight —

  All mares are dead!

  All mares are dead!

  Oh-h!

  Oh-h-h!

  Oh-h-h-h-h — h!!

  I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it,

  I can’t!

  Oh, I can’t!

  Oh —

  There’s one left!

  There’s one left!

  One!

  There’s one . . . left. . . .

  So ending on a grunt of agonised relief.

  This is the authentic Arabic interpretation of the braying

  of the ass.

  And Arabs should know.

  And yet, as his brass-resonant howling yell resounds

  through the Sicilian twilight

  I am not sure —

  His big, furry head.

  His big, regretful eyes,

  His diminished, drooping hindquarters,

  His small toes.

  Such a dear!

  Such an ass!

  With such a knot inside him!

  He regrets something that he remembers.

  That’s obvious.

  The Steppes of Tartary,

  And the wind in his teeth for a bit,

  And noli me tangere.

  Ah then, when he tore the wind with his teeth,

  And trod wolves underfoot,

  And over-rode his mares as if he were savagely leaping an

  obstacle, to set his teeth in the sun. . . .

  Somehow, alas, he fell in love,

  And was sold into slavery.

  He fell into the rut of love,

  Poor ass, like man, always in a rut,

  The pair of them alike in that.

  All his soul in his gallant member

  And his head gone heavy with the knowledge of desire

  And humiliation.

  The ass was the first of all animals to fall finally into love,

  From obstacle-leaping pride,

  Mare obstacle,

  Into love, mare-goal, and the knowledge of love.

  Hence Jesus rode him in the Triumphant Entry.

  Hence his beautiful eyes.

  Hence his ponderous head, brooding over desire, and down —

  fall, Jesus, and a pack-saddle,

  Hence he uncovers his big ass-teeth and howls in that agony

  that is half-insatiable desire and half-unquenchable

  humiliation.

  Hence the black cross on his shoulders.

  The Arabs were only half right, though they hinted the

  whole;

  Everlasting lament in everlasting desire.

  See him standing with his head down, near the Porta

  Cappuccini,

  Asinello,

  Somaro;

  With the half-veiled, beautiful eyes, and the pensive face

  not asleep,

  Motionless, like a bit of rock.

  Has he seen the Gorgon’s head, and turned to stone?

  Alas, Love did it.

  Now he’s a jackass, a pack-ass, a donkey, somaro, burro,

  with a boss piling loads on his back.

  Tied by the nose at the Porta Cappuccini.

  And tied in a knot, inside, dead-licked between two

  desires:

  To overleap like a male all mares as obstacles

  In a leap at the sun;

  And to leap in one last heart-bursting leap like a male at

  the goal of a mare,

  And there end.

  Well, you can’t have it both roads.

  Hee! Hee! Ehee! Ehow! Ehaw!! Oh! Oh! Oh-h-h!!

  The wave of agony bursts in the stone that he was,

  Bares his long ass’s teeth, flattens his long ass’s ears,

  straightens his donkey neck.

  And howls his pandemonium on the indignant air.

  Yes, it’s a quandary.

  Jesus rode on him, the first burden on the first beast of

  burden.

  Love on a submissive ass.

  So the tale began.

  But the ass never forgets.

  The horse, being nothing but a nag, will forget.

  And men, being mostly geldings and knacker-boned hacks,

  have almost all forgot.

  But the ass is a primal creature, and never forgets.

  The Steppes of Tartary,

  And Jesus on a meek ass-colt: mares: Mary escaping to

  Egypt: Joseph’s cudgel.

  Hee! Hee! Ehee! Ehow — ow-!-ow!-aw!-aw!-aw!

  All mares are dead!

  Or else I am dead!

  One of us, or the pair of us,

  I don’t know — ow! — ow!

  Which!

  Not sure-ure-ure

  Quite which!

  Which!

  Taormina.

  HE-GOAT

  SEE his black nose snubbed back, pressed over like a whale’s

  blow-holes,

  As if his nostrils were going to curve back to the root of

  his tail.

  As he charges slow among the herd

  And rows among the females like a ship pertinaciously,

  Heavy with a rancid cargo, through the lesser ships —

  Old father

  Sniffing forever ahead of him, at the rear of the goats, that

  they lift the little door,

  And rowing on, unarrived, no matter how often he enter:

  Like a big ship pushing her bowsprit over the little ships

  Then swerving and steering afresh

  And never, never arriving at journey’s end, at the rear of the

  female ships.

  Yellow eyes incomprehensible with thin slits

  To round-eyed us.

  Yet if you had whorled horns of bronze in a frontal dark wall

  At the end of a back-bone ridge, like a straight sierra

  roquena,

  And nerves urging forward to the wall, you’d have eyes like

  his,

  Especially if, being given a needle’s eye of egress elsewhere

  You tried to look back to it, and couldn’t.

  Sometimes he turns with a start, to fight, to challenge, to

  suddenly butt.

  And then you see the God that he is, in a cloud of black

  hair

  And storm-lightning-slitted eye.

  Splendidly planting his feet, one rocky foot striking the

  ground with a sudden rock-hammer announcement.

  I am here!

  And suddenly lowering his head, the whorls of bone and of

  horn

  Slowly revolving towards unexploded explosion,

  As from the stem of his bristling, lightning-conductor

  tail

  In a rush up the shrieking duct of his vertebral way

  Runs a rage drawn in from the other divinely through

  him

  Towards a shock and a crash and a smiting of horns

  ahead.

  That is a grand old lust of his, to gather the great

  Rage of the sullen-stagnating atmosphere of goats

  And bring it hurtling to a head, with crash of horns against

  the horns

  Of the opposite enemy goat,

  Thus hammering the mettle of goats into proof, and smiting

  out

  The godhead of goats from the shock.

  Things of iron are beaten on the anvil,

  And he-goat is anvil to he-goat, and hammer to he-goat

  In the business of beating the mettle of goats to a god —

  head.

  But they’ve taken his enemy from him

  And left him only his libidinousness,

  His nostrils turning back, to sniff at even himself

  And his slitted eyes seeking the needle’s eye,

  His own, unthreaded, forever.

  So it is, when they take the enemy from us,

  And we can’t fight.

  He is not fatherly, like the bull, massive Providence of hot

  blood;

  The goat is an egoist, aware of himself, devilish aware of

  himself,

  And full of malice prepense, and overweening, determined

  to stand on the highest peak

  Like the devil, and look on the world as his own.

  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

 

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