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
paean,
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,
Age-long, 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 labour,
something like an owl whooing,
And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a
lamb,
Tiie 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 again
throughout the
universe.