YOU ruffled black
blossom,
You glossy
dark wind.
Your sort of
gorgeousness,
Dark
and lustrous
And
skinny repulsive
And
poppy-glossy,
Is the
gorgeousness that evokes my most puzzled
admiration.
Your aboriginality
Deep, unexplained,
Like a Red Indian darkly
unfinished and aloof,
Seems like the black and glossy seeds of
countless
centuries.
Your wattles are the colour of
steel-slag which has been
red-hot
And is going cold,
Cooling to a powdery,
pale-oxydised sky-blue.
Why do you have wattles, and a
naked, wattled head?
Why do you arch your naked-set eye with a more-than —
comprehensible
arrogance?
The vulture is bald, so is the
condor, obscenely,
But only you have thrown this amazing mantilla of
oxydised
sky-blue
And hot red over you.
This queer dross shawl of blue and
vermilion,
Whereas
the peacock has a diadem.
I wonder why.
Perhaps it is a sort of uncanny
decoration, a veil of loose
skin.
Perhaps it is your assertion,
in all this ostentation, of raw
contradictoriness.
Your wattles drip down like a shawl to your breast
And the point of your mantilla
drops across your nose, un —
pleasantly.
Or perhaps it is something
unfinished
A bit of
slag still adhering, after your firing in the furnace
of
creation.
Or perhaps there is something in
your wattles of a bull’s
dew-lap
Which slips down like a
pendulum to balance the throbbing
mass of a generous
breast,
The over-drip of a great passion
hanging in the balance.
Only yours would be a raw, unsmelted passion,
that will not
quite fuse from the
dross.
You contract yourself,
You arch yourself as an
archer’s bow
Which
quivers indrawn as you clench your spine
Until your veiled head almost
touches backward
To
the root-rising of your erected tail.
And one intense and backward-curving
frisson
Seizes you
as you clench yourself together
Like some fierce magnet bringing its poles
together.
Burning, pale positive pole of your
wattled head!
And
from the darkness of that opposite one
The upstart of your round-barred, sun-round
tail!
Whilst between the two, along the
tense arch of your
back
Blows the magnetic current in fierce
blasts,
Ruffling
black, shining feathers like lifted mail,
Shuddering storm wind, or a
water rushing through.
Your brittle, super-sensual
arrogance
Tosses the
crape of red across your brow and down your
breast
As you draw
yourself upon yourself in insistence.
It is a declaration of such tension
in will
As time has
not dared to avouch, nor eternity been able to
unbend
Do what it
may.
A raw American
will, that has never been tempered by
life;
You brittle, will-tense bird
with a foolish eye.
The peacock lifts his rods of
bronze
And struts
blue-brilliant out of the far East.
Rut watch a turkey prancing low on
earth
Drumming his
vaulted wings, as savages drum
Their rhythms on long-drawn, hollow, sinister
drums.
The
ponderous, sombre sound of the great drum of Huichi —
lobos
In pyramid Mexico, during
sacrifice.
Drum, and the turkey
onrush
Sudden,
demonic dauntlessness, full abreast,
All the bronze gloss of all his myriad
petals
Each one
apart and instant.
Delicate frail crescent of the gentle outline of white
At each feather-tip
So delicate;
Yet the bronze wind-well
suddenly clashing
And the eye over-weening into madness.
Turkey-cock, turkey-cock
Are you the bird of the next
dawn?
Has the peacock had his day, does he
call in vain, screecher,
for the sun to
rise?
The eagle, the
dove, and the barnyard rooster, do they call
in
vain, trying to wake the morrow?
And do you await us, wattled father,
Westward?
Will your
yell do it?
Take up the trail of the vanished
American
Where it
disappeared at the foot of the crucifix.
Take up the primordial Indian
obstinacy,
The more
than human, dense insistence of will,
And disdain, and blankness, and onrush, and
prise open the
new day with
them?
The East a dead letter, and Europe
moribund. . . . Is that so?
And those sombre, dead, feather-lustrous Aztecs,
Amer —
indians,
In all the sinister splendour of their red blood
sacrifices,
Do they
stand under the dawn, half-godly, half-demon,
awaiting the cry of the turkey-cock?
Or must you go through the fire once
more, till you’re
smelted pure,
Slag-wattled
turkey-cock,
Dross-jabot?
Fiesole.