Tortoises | Page 3

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 doomed 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,
Forerunner,
Now suddenly distracted into this
mazy
sidetrack,
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. J
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 pæan,
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 the 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,
Agelong,
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