She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel
overlapping gums,
But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are
nothing to her.
She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved
beak.
Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag it in horror
away.
Mistress, reptile mistress,
You are almost too large, I am almost frightened.
He is much smaller,
Dapper beside her,
And ridiculously small.
Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look,
His, poor darling, is almost fiery.
His wimple, his blunt-prowed face,
His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long, scaled, striving
legs,
So striving, striving,
Are all more delicate than she,
And he has a cruel scar on his shell.
Poor darling, biting at her feet,
Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet,
Nipping her ankles,
Which she drags apathetic away, though without retreating
into her shell.
Agelessly silent,
And with a grim, reptile determination.
Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him, serpents’ long
obstinacy
Of horizontal persistence.
Little old man
Scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his opportunity,
Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and seizing her scaly
ankle,
And hanging grimly on,
Letting go at last as she drags away,
And closing his steel-trap face.
His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face.
Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle.
And how he feels it!
The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through
chaos,
The immune, the animate,
Enveloped in isolation,
Forerunner.
Now look at him!
Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation.
His adolescence saw him crucified into sex,
Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek his con —
summation beyond himself.
Divided into passionate duality,
He, so finished and immune, now broken into desirous
fragmentariness,
Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself
In his effort toward completion again.
Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris,
The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into pieces,
And he must struggle after reconstruction, ignominiously.
And so behold him following the tail
Of that mud-hovel of his slowly rambling spouse,
Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow,
But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence.
Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk,
Roaming over the sods,
Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail
Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell.
Their two shells like domed boats bumping,
Hers huge, his small;
Their splay feet rambling and rowing like paddles,
And stumbling mixed up in one another,
In the race of love —
Two tortoises,
She huge, he small.
She seems earthily apathetic,
And he has a reptile’s awful persistence.
I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mère Tortue.
While I, I pity Monsieur.
“He pesters her and torments her,” said the woman.
How much more is he pestered and tormented, say I.
What can he do?
He is dumb, he is visionless,
Conceptionless.
His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not
As her earthen mound moves on,
But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin,
Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell,
And drags at these with his beak.
Drags and drags and bites,
While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull mound along.
TORTOISE GALLANTRY
MAKING his advances
He does not look at her, nor sniff at her,
No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank.
Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin
That work beneath her while she sprawls along
In her ungainly pace,
Her folds of skin that work and row
Beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves.
And so he strains beneath her housey walls
And catches her trouser-legs in his beak
Suddenly, or her skinny limb,
And strange and grimly drags at her
Like a dog,
Only agelessly silent, with a reptile’s awful persistency
Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed.
Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation
And doomed to partiality, partial being,
Ache, and want of being.
Want,
Self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to add himself on to her
Born to walk alone,
Fore-runner,
Now suddenly distracted into this mazy side-track,
This awkward, harrowing pursuit,
This grim necessity from within.
Does she know
As she moves eternally slowly away?
Or is he driven against her with a bang, like a bird flying in
the dark against a window,
All knowledgeless?
The awful concussion,
And the still more awful need to persist, to follow, follow,
continue,
Driven, after aeons of pristine, fore-god-like singleness and
oneness,
At the end of some mysterious, red-hot iron,
Driven away from himself into her tracks,
Forced to crash against her.
Stiff, gallant, irascible, crook-legged reptile,
Little gentleman,
Sorry plight,
We ought to look the other way.
Save that, having come with you so far,
We will go on to the end.
TORTOISE SHOUT
I THOUGHT he was dumb,
I said he was dumb,
Yet I’ve heard him cry.
First faint scream,
Out of life’s unfathomable dawn,
Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon’s dawning rim,
Far, far off, far scream.
Tortoise in extremis.
Why were we crucified into sex?
Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves,
As we began,
As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?
A far, was-it-audible scream,
Or did it sound on the plasm direct?
Worse than the cry of the new-born,
A scream,
A yell,
A shout,
A paean,
A death-agony,
A birth-cry,
A submission,
All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn.
War-cry, triumph, acute delight, death-scream reptilian,
Why was the veil torn?
The silken shriek of the soul’s torn membrane?
The male soul’s membrane
Torn with a shriek half music, half horror.
Crucifixion.
Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense
female,
Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of t
he
shell
In tortoise-nakedness,
Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle
over her house-roof,
And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath
her walls.
Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in
uttermost tension
Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking
leap, and oh!
Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck
And giving that fragile yell, that scream,
Super-audible,
From his pink, cleft, old-man’s mouth,
Giving up the ghost,
Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.
His scream, and his moment’s subsidence,
The moment of eternal silence,
Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling
jerk of coition, and at once
The inexpressible faint yell —
And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted
back
To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.
So he tups, and screams
Time after time that frail, torn scream
After each jerk, the longish interval,
The tortoise eternity,
Age-long, reptilian persistence,
Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next
spasm.
I remember, when I was a boy,
I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot
in the mouth of an up-starting snake;
I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound
in the spring;
I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night
Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters;
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;
I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood
at midnight;
I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting
through the hours, persistent and irrepressible;
I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird,
amorous cats;
I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the
sheet-lightning,
And running away from the sound of a woman in labour,
something like an owl whooing,
And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb,
Tiie first wail of an infant,
And my mother singing to herself,
And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a
young collier, who has long since drunk himself to
death,
The first elements of foreign speech
On wild dark lips.
And more than all these,
And less than all these.
This last,
Strange, faint coition yell
Of the male tortoise at extremity,
Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon
of life.
The cross,
The wheel on which our silence first is broken,
Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability,
our deep silence
Tearing a cry from us.
Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the
deeps, calling, calling for the complement,
Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered,
having found.
Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what
is lost,
The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry
of abandonment,
That which is whole, torn asunder,
That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the
universe.
BIRDS
TURKEY-COCK
YOU ruffled black blossom,
You glossy dark wind.
Your sort of gorgeousness,
Dark and lustrous
And skinny repulsive
And poppy-glossy,
Is the gorgeousness that evokes my most puzzled admiration.
Your aboriginality
Deep, unexplained,
Like a Red Indian darkly unfinished and aloof,
Seems like the black and glossy seeds of countless
centuries.
Your wattles are the colour of steel-slag which has been
red-hot
And is going cold,
Cooling to a powdery, pale-oxydised sky-blue.
Why do you have wattles, and a naked, wattled head?
Why do you arch your naked-set eye with a more-than —
comprehensible arrogance?
The vulture is bald, so is the condor, obscenely,
But only you have thrown this amazing mantilla of oxydised
sky-blue
And hot red over you.
This queer dross shawl of blue and vermilion,
Whereas the peacock has a diadem.
I wonder why.
Perhaps it is a sort of uncanny decoration, a veil of loose
skin.
Perhaps it is your assertion, in all this ostentation, of raw
contradictoriness.
Your wattles drip down like a shawl to your breast
And the point of your mantilla drops across your nose, un —
pleasantly.
Or perhaps it is something unfinished
A bit of slag still adhering, after your firing in the furnace
of creation.
Or perhaps there is something in your wattles of a bull’s
dew-lap
Which slips down like a pendulum to balance the throbbing
mass of a generous breast,
The over-drip of a great passion hanging in the balance.
Only yours would be a raw, unsmelted passion, that will not
quite fuse from the dross.
You contract yourself,
You arch yourself as an archer’s bow
Which quivers indrawn as you clench your spine
Until your veiled head almost touches backward
To the root-rising of your erected tail.
And one intense and backward-curving frisson
Seizes you as you clench yourself together
Like some fierce magnet bringing its poles together.
Burning, pale positive pole of your wattled head!
And from the darkness of that opposite one
The upstart of your round-barred, sun-round tail!
Whilst between the two, along the tense arch of your
back
Blows the magnetic current in fierce blasts,
Ruffling black, shining feathers like lifted mail,
Shuddering storm wind, or a water rushing through.
Your brittle, super-sensual arrogance
Tosses the crape of red across your brow and down your
breast
As you draw yourself upon yourself in insistence.
It is a declaration of such tension in will
As time has not dared to avouch, nor eternity been able to
unbend
Do what it may.
A raw American will, that has never been tempered by
life;
You brittle, will-tense bird with a foolish eye.
The peacock lifts his rods of bronze
And struts blue-brilliant out of the far East.
Rut watch a turkey prancing low on earth
Drumming his vaulted wings, as savages drum
Their rhythms on long-drawn, hollow, sinister drums.
The ponderous, sombre sound of the great drum of Huichi —
lobos
In pyramid Mexico, during sacrifice.
Drum, and the turkey onrush
Sudden, demonic dauntlessness, full abreast,
All the bronze gloss of all his myriad petals
Each one apart and instant.
Delicate frail crescent of the gentle outline of white
At each feather-tip
So delicate;
Yet the bronze wind-well suddenly clashing
And the eye over-weening into madness.
Turkey-cock, turkey-cock
Are you the bird of the next dawn?
Has the peacock had his day, does he call in vain, screecher,
for the sun to rise?
The eagle, the dove, and the barnyard rooster, do they call
in vain, trying to wake the morrow?
And do you await us, wattled father, Westward?
Will your yell do it?
Take up the trail of the vanished American
Where it disappeared at the foot of the crucifix.
Take up the primordial Indian obstinacy,
The more than human, dense insistence of will,
And disdain, and blankness, and onrush, and prise open the
new day with them?
The East a dead letter, and Europe moribund. . . . Is that so?
And those sombre, dead, feather-lustrous Aztecs, Amer —
indians,
In all the sinister splendour of their red blood sacrifices,
Do they stand under the dawn, half-godly, half-demon,
awaiting the cry of the turkey-cock?
Or must you go through the fire once more, till you’re
smelted pure,
Slag-wattled turkey-cock,
Dross-jabot?
Fiesole.
HUMMING-BIRD
I CAN imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.
Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 844