Tortoises | Page 4

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
labor, something like an owl whooing,
And listening inwardly to the
first bleat of a
lamb,
The 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.
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