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 con —
summation 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 domed 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 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.