May's Lion Ll87
She retethered Rose where she could stand down in the creek if she liked. When she came back up the rise with the pail of milk in hand, the lion had not moved. The sun was down, the air above the ridges turning clear gold. The yellow eyes watched her, no light in them. She came to pour milk into the lion's bowl. As she did so, he all at once half rose up. Rains End started, and spilled some of the milk she was pouring. "Shoo! Stop that!" she whispered fiercely, waving her skinny arm at the lion. "Lie down now! I'm afraid of you when you get up, can't you see that, stupid? Lie down now, lion. There you are. Here I am. It's all right You know what you're doing" Talking softly as she went, she returned to her house of stick and matting There she sat down as before, in the open porch, on the grass mats.
The mountain lion made the grumbling sound, ending with a long sigh, and let his head sink back down on his paws.
Rains End got some combread and a tomato from the pantry box while there was still daylight left to see by, and ate slowly and neatly. She did not offer the lion food. He had not touched the milk, and she thought he would eat no more in the House of Earth.
From time to time as the quiet evening darkened and stars gathered thicker overhead she sang to the lion. She sang the five songs of Going Westward to the Sunrise, which are sung to human beings dying She did not know if it was proper and appropriate to sing these songs to a dying mountain lion, but she did not know his songs.
Twice he also sang once a quavering moan, like a house-cat challenging another torn to battle, and once a long sighing purr.
Before the Scorpion had swung clear of Sinshan Mountain, Rains End had pulled her heavy shawl around herself in case the fog came in, and had gone sound asleep in the porch of her house.
18 8 J/ BUFFALO GALS
She woke with the grey light before sunrise. The lion was a motionless shadow, a little farther from the trunk of the fig tree than he had been the night before. As the light grew, she saw that he had stretched himself out full length. She knew he had finished his dying, and sang the fifth song the last song in a whisper, for him:
The doors of the Four Houses
are open.
Surely they are open.
Near sunrise she went to milk Rose, and to wash in the creek. When she came back up to the house she went closer to the lion, though not so close as to crowd him, and stood for a long time looking at him stretched out in the long, tawny, delicate light "As thin as I am!" she said to Valiant, when she went up to Gahheya later in the morning to
tell the story and to ask help carrying the body of the lion off where the buzzards and coyotes could clean it
It's still your story, Aunt May; it was your lion. He came to you. He brought his death to you, a gift; but the men with the guns won't take gifts, they think they own death already. And so they took from you the honor he did you, and you felt that loss. I wanted to restore it But you don't need it. You followed the lion where he went, years ago now.
(1983-87)
XI
Rilke's "Eighth Duino Elegy" and "She Unnames Them"
/ learned most of my German from Mark Twain. My translation of Rise's poem was achieved by chewing up and digesting other translations --C.F. Mclntyre's still seems the truest to me -- and then using a German dictionary and a lot of nerve. The "Elegy" is the poem about animals that I have loved the longest and learned the most from.
It is followed by the story that had to come Tost in this book because it states (equivocally, of course) whose side (so long as sides must be taken) I am on and what the consequences (maybe) are.
The Eighth Elegy
(From "The Duino Elegies" of Rainer Maria Rilke)
With all its gaze the animal sees openness. Only our eyes are as if reversed, set like traps all around its free forthgoing.
What is outside, we know from the face of the animal only; for we turn even the youngest child
around and force it to see all forms backwards, not the openness so deep in the beast's gaze. Free from death.
191
192-ABUFFALO GALS
Only we see that The free animal has its dying always behind it and God in front of it, and its way
is the eternal way, as the spring flowing.
Never, not for a moment, do we have pure space before us, where the flowers endlessly open. Always it's world and never nowhere-nothing-not, that pure unoverseen we breathe
and know without desiring forever. So a child, losing itself in that silence, has to be jolted back. Or one dies, and is.
For close to death we don't see death,
but stare outward, maybe with the beast's great gaze.
And lovers, if it weren't for the other
getting in the way, come very close to it, amazed,
as if it had been left open by mistake,
behind the beloved -- but nobody
gets all the way, and it's all world again.
Facing Creation forever, all we see in it is a mirror-image of the free in our own dark shadow. Or an animal, a dumb beast, stares right through us, peaceably.
This is called Destiny: being face to face, and never anything but face to face.
Were this consciousness of ours shared by the beast, that in its certainty approaches us in a different direction, it would take us with it on its way. But its being is to it unending, uncontained, no glimpse of its condition, pure, as is its gaze. And where we see the Future, it sees all, and itself in all, and healed forever.
The Eighth Elegy A 193
Yet in the warm, watching animal
is the care and weight of a great sadness.
For it bears always, as we bear, and are borne down by, memory.
As if not long ago all we yearn for had been closer to us, truer, and the bond endlessly tender. Here all is distance, there it was breathing After the first home, the second is duplicitous, drafty.
O happiness of tiny creatures
that stay forever in the womb that bears them!
O fly's joy, buzzing still within, even on its mating-day! For womb is all.
And look at the half-certainty of birds, that from the start know almost both, like a soul of the Etruscans in the body shut inside the tomb, its own resting figure as the lid.
And how distressed the womb-born are when they must fly! As if scared
by themselves, they jerk across the air, as a crack
goes through a cup: so the bat's track
through the porcelain of twilight
And we, onlookers, always, everywhere,
our face turned to it all and never from!
It overfills us. We control it It breaks down.
We re-control it, and break down ourselves.
Who turned us round like this, so that
no matter what we do, we have the air
of somebody departing? As a traveller
on the last hill, for the last time seeing
all the home valley, turns, and stands, and lingers --
so we live forever taking leave.
194 JT
She Unnames Them
MOST OF THEM ACCEPTED NAMELESSNESS with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular grace and alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element A faction of yaks, however, protested. They said that "yak" sounded right, and that almost everyone who knew they existed called them that Unlike the ubiquitous creatures such as rats or fleas who had been called by hundreds or thousands of different names since Babel, the yaks could truly say, they said, that they had a name. They discussed the matter all summer. The councils of the elderly females finally agreed that though the name might be useful to others, it was so redundant from the yak point of view that they never spoke it themselves, and hence might as well dispense with it After they presented the argument in this light to their bulls, a full consensus was delayed only by the onset of severe early blizzards. Soon after the beg
inning of the thaw their agreement was reached and the designation "yak" was returned to the donor.
Among the domestic animals, few horses had cared what anybody called them since the failure of Dean Swift's attempt to name them from their own vocabulary. Cattle, sheep, swine, asses, mules, and goats, along with chickens, geese, and turkeys, all agreed enthusiastically to give their names back to the people to whom -- as they put it -- they belonged.
A couple of problems did come up with pets. The cats of course steadfastly denied ever having had any name other than those selfgiven, unspoken, effanineffably personal
She Unnames Them L 195
names which, as the poet named Eliot said, they spend long hours daily contemplating -- though none of the con-templators has ever admitted that what they contemplate is in fact their name, and some onlookers have wondered if the object of that meditative gaze might not in fact be the Perfect, or Platonic, Mouse. In any case it is a moot point now. It was with the dogs, and with some parrots, lovebirds, ravens, and mynahs that the trouble arose. These verbally talented individuals insisted that their names were important to them, and flatly refused to part with them. But as soon as they understood that the issue was precisely one of individual choice, and that anybody who wanted to be called Rover, or Froufrou, or Polly, or even Birdie in the personal sense, was perfectly free to do so, not one of them had the least objection to parting with the lower case (or, as regards German creatures, uppercase) generic appellations poodle, parrot dog, or bird, and all the Linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail.
The insects parted with their names in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing and stinging and humming and flitting and
crawling and tunneling away.
As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace.
None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to smell one another's smells, feel or rub or caress one another's scales or skin or
196 JT BUFFALO GALS
feathers or fur, taste one another's blood or flesh, keep one another warm, -- that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.
This was more or less the effect I had been after. It was somewhat more powerful than I had anticipated, but I could not now, in all conscience, make an exception for myself. I resolutely put anxiety away, went to Adam, and said, 'You and your father lent me this -- gave it to me, actually. It's been really useful, but it doesn't exactly seem to fit very well lately. But thanks very much! It's really been very useful."
It is hard to give back a gift without sounding peevish or ungrateful, and I did not want to leave him with that impression of me. He was not paying much attention, as it happened, and said only, "Put it down over there, OK?" and went on with what he was doing.
One of my reasons for doing what I did was that talk was getting us nowhere; but all the same I felt a little let down. I had been prepared to defend my decision. And I thought that perhaps when he did notice he might be upset and want to talk. I put some things away and fiddled around a little, but he continued to do what he was doing and to take no notice of anything else. At last I said, "Well, goodbye, dear. I hope the garden key turns up."
He was fitting parts together, and said without looking around, "OK, fine, dear. When's dinner?"
"I'm not sure," I said. "I'm going now. With the -- " I hesitated, and finally said, "With them, you know," and went on. In fact I had only just then realized how hard it would have been to explain myself. I could not chatter away as I used to do, taking it all for granted. My words now must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house, between the dark-branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.
(1985)
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