Part 4

Round and round and round With a twitchy, nervous, intolerable flight, And a neurasthenic lunge, And an impure frenzy; A bat, big as a swallow.

_Out, out of my room!_

The Venetian shutters I push wide To the free, calm upper air; Loop back the curtains....

_Now out, out from my room!_

So to drive him out, flicking with my white handkerchief: _Go!_ But he will not.

Round and round and round In an impure haste, Fumbling, a beast in air, And stumbling, lunging and touching the walls, the bell-wires About my room!

Always refusing to go out into the air Above that crash-gulf of the Via de’ Bardi, Yet blind with frenzy, with cluttered fear.

At last he swerved into the window bay, But blew back, as if an incoming wind blew him in again. A strong inrushing wind.

And round and round and round! Blundering more insane, and leaping, in throbs, to clutch at a corner, At a wire, at a bell-rope: On and on, watched relentless by me, round and round in my room, Round and round and dithering with tiredness and haste and increasing delirium Flicker-splashing round my room.

I would not let him rest; Not one instant cleave, cling like a blot with his breast to the wall In an obscure corner. Not an instant!

I flicked him on, Trying to drive him through the window.

Again he swerved into the window bay And I ran forward, to frighten him forth. But he rose, and from a terror worse than me he flew past me Back into my room, and round, round, round in my room Clutch, cleave, stagger, Dropping about the air Getting tired.

Something seemed to blow him back from the window Every time he swerved at it; Back on a strange parabola, then round, round, dizzy in my room.

He _could_ not go out, I also realised.... It was the light of day which he could not enter, Any more than I could enter the white-hot door of a blast-furnace.

He could not plunge into the daylight that streamed at the window. It was asking too much of his nature.

Worse even than the hideous terror of me with my handkerchief Saying: _Out, go out!..._ Was the horror of white daylight in the window!

So I switched on the electric light, thinking: _Now_ _The outside will seem brown...._

But no. The outside did not seem brown. And he did not mind the yellow electric light.

Silent! He was having a silent rest. _But never!_ _Not in my room._

Round and round and round Near the ceiling as if in a web, Staggering; Plunging, falling out of the web, Broken in heaviness, Lunging blindly, Heavier; And clutching, clutching for one second’s pause, Always, as if for one drop of rest, One little drop.

And I! _Never_, I say.... _Go out!_

Flying slower, Seeming to stumble, to fall in air. Blind-weary.

Yet never able to pass the whiteness of light into freedom ... A bird would have dashed through, come what might.

Fall, sink, lurch, and round and round Flicker, flicker-heavy; Even wings heavy: And cleave in a high corner for a second, like a clot, also a prayer.

_But no._ _Out, you beast._

Till he fell in a corner, palpitating, spent. And there, a clot, he squatted and looked at me. With sticking-out, bead-berry eyes, black, And improper derisive ears, And shut wings, And brown, furry body.

Brown, nut-brown, fine fur! But it might as well have been hair on a spider; thing With long, black-paper ears.

So, a dilemma! He squatted there like something unclean.

No, he must not squat, nor hang, obscene, in my room!

Yet nothing on earth will give him courage to pass the sweet fire of day.

What then? Hit him and kill him and throw him away?

Nay, I didn’t create him. Let the God that created him be responsible for his death ... Only, in the bright day, I will not have this clot in my room.

Let the God who is maker of bats watch with them in their unclean corners.... I admit a God in every crevice, But not bats in my room; Nor the God of bats, while the sun shines.

_So out, out you brute!..._ And he lunged, flight-heavy, away from me, sideways, _a sghembo_! And round and round and round my room, a clot with wings, Impure even in weariness.

Wings dark skinny and flapping the air, Lost their flicker. Spent.

He fell again with a little thud Near the curtain on the floor. And there lay.

Ah death, death You are no solution! Bats must be bats.

Only life has a way out. And the human soul is fated to wide-eyed responsibility In life.

So I picked him up in a flannel jacket, Well covered, lest he should bite me. For I would have had to kill him if he’d bitten me, the impure one.... And he hardly stirred in my hand, muffled up.

Hastily, I shook him out of the window.

And away he went! Fear craven in his tail. Great haste, and straight, almost bird straight above the Via de’ Bardi. Above that crash-gulf of exploding whips, Towards the Borgo San Jacopo.

And now, at evening, as he flickers over the river Dipping with petty triumphant flight, and tittering over the sun’s departure, I believe he chirps, pipistrello, seeing me here on this terrace writing: _There he sits, the long loud one!_ _But I am greater than he ..._ _I escaped him...._ _Florence._

REPTILES

SNAKE

A snake came to my water-trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree I came down the steps with my pitcher And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough And rested his throat upon the stone bottom, And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness, He sipped with his straight mouth, Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough, And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do, And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment, And stooped and drank a little more, Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me He must be killed, For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him, How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless, Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured? I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices: _If you were not afraid, you would kill him!_

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more That he should seek my hospitality From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken, And dickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black, Seeming to lick his lips, And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air, And slowly turned his head, And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream, Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther, A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole, Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after, Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher, I picked up a clumsy log And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him, But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste, Writhed like lightning, and was gone Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front, At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it. I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross, And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king, Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords Of life. And I have something to expiate; A pettiness. _Taormina._

BABY TORTOISE

You know what it is to be born alone, Baby tortoise!

The first day to heave your feet little by little from the shell, Not yet awake, And remain lapsed on earth, Not quite alive.

A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.

To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if it would never open, Like some iron door; To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower base And reach your skinny little neck And take your first bite at some dim bit of herbage, Alone, small insect, Tiny bright-eye, Slow one.

To take your first solitary bite And move on your slow, solitary hunt. Your bright, dark little eye, Your eye of a dark disturbed night, Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise, So indomitable.

No one ever heard you complain.

You draw your head forward, slowly, from your little wimple And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-pinned toes, Rowing slowly forward. Whither away, small bird?

Rather like a baby working its limbs, Except that you make slow, ageless progress And a baby makes none.

The touch of sun excites you, And the long ages, and the lingering chill Make you pause to yawn, Opening your impervious mouth, Suddenly beak-shaped, and very wide, like some suddenly gaping pincers; Soft red tongue, and hard thin gums, Then close the wedge of your little mountain front, Your face, baby tortoise.

Do you wonder at the world, as slowly you turn your head in its wimple And look with laconic, black eyes? Or is sleep coming over you again, The non-life?

You are so hard to wake.

Are you able to wonder? Or is it just your indomitable will and pride of the first life Looking round And slowly pitching itself against the inertia Which had seemed invincible?

The vast inanimate, And the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye, Challenger.

Nay, tiny shell-bird, What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you must row against, What an incalculable inertia.

Challenger, Little Ulysses, fore-runner, No bigger than my thumb-nail, Buon viaggio.

All animate creation on your shoulder, Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield.

The ponderous, preponderate, Inanimate universe; And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone.

How vivid your travelling seems now, in the troubled sunshine, Stoic, Ulyssean atom; Suddenly hasty, reckless, on high toes.

Voiceless little bird, Resting your head half out of your wimple In the slow dignity of your eternal pause. Alone, with no sense of being alone, And hence six times more solitary; Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through immemorial ages Your little round house in the midst of chaos.

Over the garden earth, Small bird, Over the edge of all things.

Traveller, With your tail tucked a little on one side Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.

All life carried on your shoulder, Invincible fore-runner.

TORTOISE SHELL

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.

TORTOISE FAMILY CONNECTIONS

On he goes, the little one, Bud of the universe, Pediment of life.

Setting off somewhere, apparently. Whither away, brisk egg?

His mother deposited him on the soil as if he were no more than droppings, And now he scuffles tinily past her as if she were an old rusty tin.

A mere obstacle, He veers round the slow great mound of her-- Tortoises always foresee obstacles.

It is no use my saying to him in an emotional voice: “This is your Mother, she laid you when you were an egg.”

He does not even trouble to answer: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” He wearily looks the other way, And she even more wearily looks another way still, Each with the utmost apathy, Incognisant, Unaware, Nothing.

As for papa, He snaps when I offer him his offspring, Just as he snaps when I poke a bit of stick at him, Because he is irascible this morning, an irascible tortoise Being touched with love, and devoid of fatherliness.

Father and mother, And three little brothers, And all rambling aimless, like little perambulating pebbles scattered in the garden, Not knowing each other from bits of earth or old tins.

Except that papa and mama are old acquaintances, of course, Though family feeling there is none, not even the beginnings.

Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, sisterless Little tortoise.

Row on then, small pebble, Over the clods of the autumn, wind-chilled sunshine, Young gaiety.

Does he look for a companion?

No, no, don’t think it. He doesn’t know he is alone; Isolation is his birthright, This atom.

To row forward, and reach himself tall on spiny toes, To travel, to burrow into a little loose earth, afraid of the night, To crop a little substance, To move, and to be quite sure that he is moving: Basta! To be a tortoise! Think of it, in a garden of inert clods A brisk, brindled little tortoise, all to himself-- Crœsus!

In a garden of pebbles and insects To roam, and feel the slow heart beat Tortoise-wise, the first bell sounding From the warm blood, in the dark-creation morning.

Moving, and being himself, Slow, and unquestioned, And inordinately there, O stoic! Wandering in the slow triumph of his own existence, Ringing the soundless bell of his presence in chaos, And biting the frail grass arrogantly, Decidedly arrogantly.

LUI ET ELLE

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 consummation 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.

TORTOISE GALLANTRY

Making his advances He does not look at her, nor sniff at her, No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank.

Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin That work beneath her while she sprawls along In her ungainly pace, Her folds of skin that work and row Beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves.

And so he strains beneath her housey walls And catches her trouser-legs in his beak Suddenly, or her skinny limb, And strange and grimly drags at her Like a dog, Only agelessly silent, with a reptile’s awful persistency

Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed. Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation And doomed to partiality, partial being, Ache, and want of being, Want, Self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to add himself on to her

Born to walk alone, Fore-runner, Now suddenly distracted into this mazy side-track, This awkward, harrowing pursuit, This grim necessity from within.

Does she know As she moves eternally slowly away? Or is he driven against her with a bang, like a bird flying in the dark against a window, All knowledgeless?

The awful concussion, And the still more awful need to persist, to follow, follow, continue,

Driven, after æons of pristine, fore-god-like singleness and oneness, At the end of some mysterious, red-hot iron, Driven away from himself into her tracks, Forced to crash against her.

Stiff, gallant, irascible, crook-legged reptile, Little gentleman, Sorry plight, We ought to look the other way.

Save that, having come with you so far, We will go on to the end.

TORTOISE SHOUT

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?