Tortoises | Page 2

use my saying to him in an emotional
voice:?"This is your Mother, she laid you when you were
an egg."
He does not even trouble to answer: "Woman,
what have I to do with thee?"?He wearily looks the other way,?And she even more wearily looks another way
still,?Each with the utmost apathy,?Incognizant,?Unaware,?Nothing.
As for papa,?He snaps when I offer him his offspring,?Just as he snaps when I poke a bit of stick at him,?Because he is irascible this morning, an irascible
tortoise?Being touched with love, and devoid of
fatherliness.
Father and mother,?And three little brothers,?And all rambling aimless, like little perambulating
pebbles scattered in the garden,?Not knowing each other from bits of earth or old
tins.
Except that papa and mama are old acquaintances,
of course,?But family feeling there is none, not even the
beginnings.
Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, sisterless?Little tortoise.
Row on then, small pebble,?Over the clods of the autumn, wind-chilled
sunshine,?Young gayety.
Does he look for a companion??No, no, don't think it.?He doesn't know he is alone;?Isolation is his birthright,?This atom.
To row forward, and reach himself tall on spiny
toes,?To travel, to burrow into a little loose earth,
afraid of the night,?To crop a little substance,?To move, and to be quite sure that he is moving:?Basta!
To be a tortoise!?Think of it, in a garden of inert clods?A brisk, brindled little tortoise, all to himself--?Croesus!
In a garden of pebbles and insects?To roam, and feel the slow heart beat?Tortoise-wise, the first bell sounding?From the warm blood, in the dark-creation
morning.
Moving, and being himself,?Slow, and unquestioned,?And inordinately there, O stoic!?Wandering in the slow triumph of his own
existence,?Ringing the soundless bell of his presence in
chaos,?And biting the frail grass arrogantly,?Decidedly arrogantly.
LUI ET ELLE
She is large and matronly?And rather dirty,?A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had
driven her to it.
Though what she does, except lay four eggs at
random in the garden once a year?And put up with her husband,?I don't know.
She likes to eat.
She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny
legs,?When food is going.?Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes.
She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great
mouthfuls,?Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron,
pristine face?Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth?Like sudden curved scissors,?And gulping at more than she can swallow, and
working her thick, soft tongue,?And having the bread hanging over her chin.
O Mistress, Mistress,?Reptile mistress,?Your eye is very dark, very bright,?And it never softens?Although you watch.
She knows,?She knows well enough to come for food,?Yet she sees me not;?Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything,?Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless,?Reptile mistress.
Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless
mouth,?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 consummation 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 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