SEE his black nose snubbed back,
pressed over like a whale’s
blow-holes,
As if
his nostrils were going to curve back to the root of
his tail.
As he charges slow among the
herd
And rows among
the females like a ship pertinaciously,
Heavy with a rancid cargo,
through the lesser ships —
Old father
Sniffing
forever ahead of him, at the rear of the goats, that
they lift the little door,
And rowing on, unarrived, no matter how often he
enter:
Like a big
ship pushing her bowsprit over the little ships
Then swerving and steering
afresh
And never,
never arriving at journey’s end, at the rear of the
female ships.
Yellow eyes incomprehensible with
thin slits
To
round-eyed us.
Yet if you had whorled horns of
bronze in a frontal dark wall
At the end of a back-bone ridge, like a straight
sierra
roquena,
And nerves urging forward to
the wall, you’d have eyes like
his,
Especially if, being given a
needle’s eye of egress elsewhere
You tried to look back to it, and
couldn’t.
Sometimes he turns with a start, to
fight, to challenge, to
suddenly
butt.
And then you
see the God that he is, in a cloud of black
hair
And
storm-lightning-slitted eye.
Splendidly planting his feet, one rocky foot
striking the
ground with a sudden rock-hammer
announcement.
I am here!
And suddenly lowering his head,
the whorls of bone and of
horn
Slowly revolving towards
unexploded explosion,
As from the stem of his bristling,
lightning-conductor
tail
In a rush up the shrieking duct of his vertebral
way
Runs a rage
drawn in from the other divinely through
him
Towards a shock
and a crash and a smiting of horns
ahead.
That is a grand old lust of his, to
gather the great
Rage of the sullen-stagnating atmosphere of goats
And bring it hurtling to a
head, with crash of horns against
the
horns
Of the
opposite enemy goat,
Thus hammering the mettle of goats into proof, and
smiting
out
The godhead of goats from the shock.
Things of iron are beaten on
the anvil,
And
he-goat is anvil to he-goat, and hammer to he-goat
In the business of beating the
mettle of goats to a god —
head.
But they’ve taken his enemy from
him
And left him
only his libidinousness,
His nostrils turning back, to sniff at even
himself
And his
slitted eyes seeking the needle’s eye,
His own, unthreaded,
forever.
So it is, when they take the enemy
from us,
And we
can’t fight.
He is not fatherly, like the bull,
massive Providence of hot
blood;
The goat is
an egoist, aware of himself, devilish aware of
himself,
And full of
malice prepense, and overweening, determined
to stand on the highest peak
Like the devil, and look on the world as his
own.
And as for love:
With a needle of long red flint
he stabs in the dark
At the living rock he is up against;
While she with her goaty mouth stands smiling
the while as
he strikes, since sure
He will never quite strike
home, on the target-quick, for her
quick
Is just beyond
range of the arrow he shoots
From his leap at the zenith in her, so it falls
just short of the
mark, far enough.
It is over before it is
finished.
She,
smiling with goaty munch-mouth, Mona Lisa, arranges
it so.
Orgasm after orgasm after
orgasm
And he smells
so rank and his nose goes back,
And never an enemy brow-metalled to thresh it
out with in
the open field;
Never a mountain peak, to be
king of the castle.
Only those eternal females to overleap and surpass, and
never succeed.
The involved voluptuousness of the
soft-footed cat
Who
is like a fur folding a fur,
The cat who laps blood, and knows
The soft welling of blood
invincible even beyond bone or
metal of
bone.
The soft, the secret, the
unfathomable blood
The cat has lapped
And known it subtler than frisson-shaken nerves,
Stronger than multiplicity of
bone on bone
And
darker than even the arrows of violentest will
Can pierce, for that is where
will gives out, like a sinking
stone that can
sink no further.
But he-goat,
Black procreant male of the
selfish will and libidinous desire,
God in black cloud with curving horns of
bronze,
Find an
enemy, Egoist, and clash the cymbals in face-to-face
defiance,
And let
the lightning out of your smothered dusk.
Forget the female herd for a
bit,
And fight to be
boss of the world.
Fight, old Satan with a selfish will, fight for your selfish
will;
Fight to be
the devil on the tip of the peak
Overlooking the world for his
own.
But bah, how can he, poor domesticated beast!
Taormina.