THE Cross, the Cross
Goes deeper in than we
know,
Deeper into
life;
Right into the
marrow
And through
the bone.
Along the back of the baby
tortoise
The scales
are locked in an arch like a bridge,
Scale-lapping, like a lobster’s
sections
Or a
bee’s.
Then crossways down his
sides
Tiger-stripes
and wasp-bands.
Five, and five again, and five
again,
And round the
edges twenty-five little ones,
The sections of the baby tortoise
shell.
Four, and a keystone;
Four, and a
keystone;
Four, and
a keystone;
Then
twenty-four, and a tiny little keystone.
It needed Pythagoras to see life
playing with counters on the
living
back
Of the baby
tortoise;
Life
establishing the first eternal mathematical tablet,
Not in stone, like the Judean
Lord, or bronze, but in life —
clouded, life-rosy tortoise
shell.
The first little mathematical
gentleman
Stepping,
wee mite, in his loose trousers
Under all the eternal dome of mathematical
law.
Fives, and tens,
Threes and fours and
twelves,
All the
volte face of decimals,
The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of
seven.
Turn him on his back,
The kicking little
beetle,
And there
again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching belly,
The long cleavage of division,
upright of the eternal cross
And on either side count five,
On each side, two above, on
each side, two below
The dark bar horizontal.
The Cross!
It goes right through him, the
sprottling insect,
Through his cross-wise cloven psyche,
Through his five-fold
complex-nature.
So turn him over on his toes
again;
Four
pin-point toes, and a problematical thumb-piece,
Four rowing limbs, and one
wedge-balancing head,
Four and one makes five, which is the clue to
all
mathematics.
The Lord wrote it all down on the
little slate
Of the
baby tortoise.
Outward and visible indication of the plan within,
The complex, manifold
involvedness of an individual creature
Plotted out
On this small bird, this rudiment,
This little dome, this
pediment
Of all
creation,
This slow
one.