SHE said as well to me: “Why are you
ashamed?
That
little bit of your chest that shows between
the gap of your shirt, why
cover it up?
Why
shouldn’t your legs and your good strong thighs
be rough and hairy? — I’m
glad they are like that.
You are shy, you silly, you silly shy
thing.
Men are the
shyest creatures, they never will come
out of their covers. Like any
snake
slipping
into its bed of dead leaves, you hurry into
your clothes.
And I love you so! Straight
and clean and all of a
piece is the body of a man,
such an instrument, a spade,
like a spear, or an oar,
such a joy to me — “
So she laid her hands and
pressed them down my sides,
so that I began to wonder over myself, and what
I was.
She said to me: “What an instrument, your
body!
single and
perfectly distinct from everything else!
What a tool in the hands of
the Lord!
Only God
could have brought it to its shape.
It feels as if his handgrasp, wearing
you
had polished
you and hollowed you,
hollowed this groove in your sides, grasped
you
under the
breasts
and
brought you to the very quick of your form,
subtler than an old,
soft-worn fiddle-bow.
“When I was a child, I loved my father’s riding-
whip
that he used
so often.
I loved
to handle it, it seemed like a near part of him.
So I did his pens, and the
jasper seal on his desk.
Something seemed to surge through me when
I
touched
them.
“So it is with you, but here
The joy I feel!
God knows what I feel, but it
is joy!
Look, you
are clean and fine and singled out!
I admire you so, you are beautiful: this
clean
sweep of
your sides, this firmness, this hard mould!
I would die rather than have
it injured with one scar.
I wish I could grip you like the fist of the
Lord,
and have you
— “
So she said, and I wondered,
feeling trammelled and
hurt.
It did not
make me free.
Now I say to her: “No tool, no instrument,
no
God!
Don’t touch
me and appreciate me.
It is an infamy.
You would think twice before you touched
a
weasel on a
fence
as it lifts
its straight white throat.
Your hand would not be so flig and
easy.
Nor the
adder we saw asleep with her head on her shoulder,
curled up in the sunshine
like a princess;
when she lifted her head in delicate, startled wonder
you did not stretch forward
to caress her
though she looked rarely beautiful
and a miracle as she glided delicately away,
with
such
dignity.
And the
young bull in the field, with his wrinkled,
sad face,
you are afraid if he rises to
his feet,
though
he is all wistful and pathetic, like a mono —
lith, arrested, static.
“Is there nothing in me to make you
hesitate?
I tell
you there is all these.
And why should you overlook them in me? —
“