Tortoises | Page 3

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 p?an,?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 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