Part 6

Queer it is, suddenly, in the garden To catch sight of her standing like some huge, ghoulish grey bird in the air, on the bough of the leaning almond-tree, Straight as a board on the bough, looking down like some hairy horrid God the Father in a William Blake imagination. _Come down, crapa, out of that almond tree!_

Instead of which she strangely rears on her perch in the air, vast beast, And strangely paws the air, delicate, And reaches her black-striped face up like a snake, far up, Subtly, to the twigs overhead, far up, vast beast, And snaps them sharp, with a little twist of her anaconda head; All her great hairy-shaggy belly open against the morning.

At seasons she curls back her tail like a green leaf in the fire, Or like a lifted hand, hailing at her wrong end. And having exposed the pink place of her nakedness, fixedly, She trots on blithe toes, And if you look at her, she looks back with a cold, sardonic stare. Sardonic, sardonyx, rock of cold fire. _See me?_ She says, _That’s me!_

That’s her.

Then she leaps the rocks like a quick rock, Her back-bone sharp as a rock, Sheer will.

Along which ridge of libidinous magnetism Defiant, curling the leaf of her tail as if she were curling her lip behind her at all life, Libidinous desire runs back and forth, asserting itself in that little lifted bare hand.

Yet she has such adorable spurty kids, like spurts of black ink. And in a month again is as if she had never had them.

And when the billy goat mounts her She is brittle as brimstone. While his slitted eyes squint back to the roots of his ears. _Taormina._

ELEPHANT

You go down shade to the river, where naked men sit on flat brown rocks, to watch the ferry, in the sun; And you cross the ferry with the naked people, go up the tropical lane Through the palm-trees and past hollow paddy-fields where naked men are threshing rice And the monolithic water-buffaloes, like old, muddy stones with hair on them, are being idle; And through the shadow of bread-fruit trees, with their dark green, glossy, fanged leaves Very handsome, and some pure yellow fanged leaves; Out into the open, where the path runs on the top of a dyke between paddy-fields: And there, of course, you meet a huge and mud-grey elephant advancing his frontal bone, his trunk curled round a log of wood: So you step down the bank, to make way.

Shuffle, shuffle, and his little wicked eye has seen you as he advances above you, The slow beast curiously spreading his round feet for the dust. And the slim naked man slips down, and the beast deposits the lump of wood, carefully. The keeper hooks the vast knee, the creature salaams.

White man, you are saluted. Pay a few cents.

But the best is the Pera-hera, at midnight, under the tropical stars, With a pale little wisp of a Prince of Wales, diffident, up in a small pagoda on the temple side And white people in evening dress buzzing and crowding the stand upon the grass below and opposite: And at last the Pera-hera procession, flambeaux aloft in the tropical night, of blazing cocoa-nut, Naked dark men beneath, And the huge frontal of three great elephants stepping forth to the tom-tom’s beat, in the torch-light, Slowly sailing in gorgeous apparel through the flame-light, in front of a towering, grimacing white image of wood.

The elephant bells striking slow, tong-tong, tong-tong, To music and queer chanting: Enormous shadow-processions filing on in the flare of fire In the fume of cocoa-nut oil, in the sweating tropical night, In the noise of the tom-toms and singers; Elephants after elephants curl their trunks, vast shadows, and some cry out As they approach and salaam, under the dripping fire of the torches That pale fragment of a Prince up there, whose motto is _Ich dien_.

Pale, dispirited Prince, with his chin on his hands, his nerves tired out, Watching and hardly seeing the trunk-curl approach and clumsy, knee-lifting salaam Of the hugest, oldest of beasts in the night and the fire-flare below. He is royalty, pale and dejected fragment up aloft. And down below huge homage of shadowy beasts; barefoot and trunk-lipped in the night.

Chieftains, three of them abreast, on foot Strut like peg-tops, wound around with hundreds of yards of fine linen. They glimmer with tissue of gold, and golden threads on a jacket of velvet, And their faces are dark, and fat, and important.

They are royalty, dark-faced royalty, showing the conscious whites of their eyes And stepping in homage, stubborn, to that nervous pale lad up there.

More elephants, tong, tong-tong, loom up, Huge, more tassels swinging, more dripping fire of new cocoa-nut cressets High, high flambeaux, smoking of the east; And scarlet hot embers of torches knocked out of the sockets among bare feet of elephants and men on the path in the dark. And devil dancers luminous with sweat, dancing on to the shudder of drums, Tom-toms, weird music of the devil, voices of men from the jungle singing; Endless, under the Prince.

Towards the tail of the everlasting procession In the long hot night, mere dancers from insignificant villages, And smaller, more frightened elephants. Men-peasants from jungle villages dancing and running with sweat and laughing, Naked dark men with ornaments on, on their naked arms and their naked breasts, the grooved loins Gleaming like metal with running sweat as they suddenly turn, feet apart, And dance, and dance, forever dance, with breath half sobbing in dark, sweat-shining breasts, And lustrous great tropical eyes unveiled now, gleaming a kind of laugh, A naked, gleaming dark laugh, like a secret out in the dark, And flare of a tropical energy, tireless, afire in the dark, slim limbs and breasts, Perpetual, fire-laughing motion, among the slow shuffle Of elephants, The hot dark blood of itself a-laughing, wet, half-devilish, men all motion Approaching under that small pavilion, and tropical eyes dilated look up Inevitably look up To the Prince To that tired remnant of royalty up there Whose motto is _Ich dien_.

As if the homage of the kindled blood of the east Went up in wavelets to him, from the breasts and eyes of jungle torch-men, And he couldn’t take it.

What would they do, those jungle men running with sweat, with the strange dark laugh in their eyes, glancing up, And the sparse-haired elephants slowly following, If they knew that his motto was _Ich dien_? And that he meant it.

They begin to understand The rickshaw boys begin to understand And then the devil comes into their faces, But a different sort, a cold, rebellious, jeering devil.

In elephants and the east are two devils, in all men maybe. The mystery of the dark mountain of blood, reeking in homage, in lust, in rage, And passive with everlasting patience, Then the little, cunning pig-devil of the elephant’s lurking eyes, the unbeliever.

We dodged, when the Pera-hera was finished, under the hanging, hairy pigs’ tails And the flat, flaccid mountains of the elephants’ standing haunches, Vast-blooded beasts, Myself so little dodging rather scared against the eternal wrinkled pillars of their legs, as they were being dismantled; Then I knew they were dejected, having come to hear the repeated Royal summons: _Dient Ihr!_ _Serve!_ _Serve, vast mountainous blood, in submission and splendour, serve royalty._ Instead of which, the silent, fatal emission from that pale, shattered boy up there: _Ich dien._

That’s why the night fell in frustration. That’s why, as the elephants ponderously, with unseeming swiftness, galloped uphill in the night, going back to the jungle villages, As the elephant bells sounded tong-tong-tong, bell of the temple of blood in the night, swift-striking, And the crowd like a field of rice in the dark gave way like liquid to the dark Looming gallop of the beasts, It was as if the great bare bulks of elephants in the obscure light went over the hill-brow swiftly, with their tails between their legs, in haste to get away, Their bells sounding frustrate and sinister.

And all the dark-faced, cotton-wrapped people, more numerous and whispering than grains of rice in a ricefield at night, All the dark-faced, cotton-wrapped people, a countless host on the shores of the lake, like thick wild rice by the water’s edge, Waiting for the fireworks of the after-show, As the rockets went up, and the glare passed over countless faces, dark as black rice growing, Showing a glint of teeth, and glancing tropical eyes aroused in the night, There was the faintest twist of mockery in every face, across the hiss of wonders as the rocket burst High, high up, in flakes, shimmering flakes of blue fire, above the palm-trees of the islet in the lake, O faces upturned to the glare, O tropical wonder, wonder, a miracle in heaven! And the shadow of a jeer, of underneath disappointment, as the rocket-coruscation died, and shadow was the same as before.

They were foiled, the myriad whispering dark-faced cotton-wrapped people. They had come to see royalty, To bow before royalty, in the land of elephants, bow deep, bow deep. Bow deep, for it’s good as a draught of cool water to bow very, very low to the royal.

And all there was to bow to, a weary, diffident boy whose motto is _Ich dien_. _I serve! I serve!_ in all the weary iron of his mien--_’Tis I who serve!_ Drudge to the public.

I wish they had given the three feathers to me; That I had been he in the pavilion, as in a pepper-box aloft and alone To stand and hold feathers, three feathers above the world, And say to them: _Dient Ihr! Dient!_ _Omnes, vos omnes, servite._ _Serve me, I am meet to be served._ _Being royal of the gods._

And to the elephants: _First great beasts of the earth A prince has come back to you, Blood-mountains. Crook the knee and be glad._ _Kandy._

KANGAROO

In the northern hemisphere Life seems to leap at the air, or skim under the wind Like stags on rocky ground, or pawing horses, or springy scut-tailed rabbits.

Or else rush horizontal to charge at the sky’s horizon, Like bulls or bisons or wild pigs.

Or slip like water slippery towards its ends, As foxes, stoats, and wolves, and prairie dogs.

Only mice, and moles, and rats, and badgers, and beavers, and perhaps bears Seem belly-plumbed to the earth’s mid-navel. Or frogs that when they leap come flop, and flop to the centre of the earth.

But the yellow antipodal Kangaroo, when she sits up, Who can unseat her, like a liquid drop that is heavy, and just touches earth.

The downward drip. The down-urge. So much denser than cold-blooded frogs.

Delicate mother Kangaroo Sitting up there rabbit-wise, but huge, plumb-weighted, And lifting her beautiful slender face, oh! so much more gently and finely lined than a rabbit’s, or than a hare’s, Lifting her face to nibble at a round white peppermint drop, which she loves, sensitive mother Kangaroo.

Her sensitive, long, pure-bred face. Her full antipodal eyes, so dark, So big and quiet and remote, having watched so many empty dawns in silent Australia.

Her little loose hands, and drooping Victorian shoulders. And then her great weight below the waist, her vast pale belly With a thin young yellow little paw hanging out, and straggle of a long thin ear, like ribbon, Like a funny trimming to the middle of her belly, thin little dangle of an immature paw, and one thin ear.

Her belly, her big haunches And in addition, the great muscular python-stretch of her tail.

There, she shan’t have any more peppermint drops. So she wistfully, sensitively sniffs the air, and then turns, goes off in slow sad leaps

On the long flat skis of her legs, Steered and propelled by that steel-strong snake of a tail.

Stops again, half turns, inquisitive to look back. While something stirs quickly in her belly, and a lean little face comes out, as from a window, Peaked and a bit dismayed, Only to disappear again quickly away from the sight of the world, to snuggle down in the warmth, Leaving the trail of a different paw hanging out.

Still she watches with eternal, cocked wistfulness! How full her eyes are, like the full, fathomless, shining eyes of an Australian black-boy Who has been lost so many centuries on the margins of existence!

She watches with insatiable wistfulness. Untold centuries of watching for something to come, For a new signal from life, in that silent lost land of the South.

Where nothing bites but insects and snakes and the sun, small life. Where no bull roared, no cow ever lowed, no stag cried, no leopard screeched, no lion coughed, no dog barked, But all was silent save for parrots occasionally, in the haunted blue bush.

Wistfully watching, with wonderful liquid eyes. And all her weight, all her blood, dripping sack-wise down towards the earth’s centre, And the live little one taking in its paw at the door of her belly.

Leap then, and come down on the line that draws to the earth’s deep, heavy centre. _Sydney_

BIBBLES

Bibbles Little black dog in New Mexico, Little black snub-nosed bitch with a shoved-out jaw And a wrinkled reproachful look; Little black female pup, sort of French bull, they say, With bits of brindle coming through, like rust, to show you’re not pure; Not pure, Bibbles, Bubsey, bat-eared dog; Not black enough!

First live thing I’ve “owned” since the lop-eared rabbits when I was a lad, And those over-prolific white mice, and Adolf, and Rex whom I didn’t own. And even now, Bibbles, little Ma’am, it’s you who appropriated me, not I you. As Benjamin Franklin appropriated Providence to his purposes.

Oh Bibbles, black little bitch I’d never have let you appropriate me, had I known. I never dreamed, till now, of the awful time the Lord must have, “owning” humanity, Especially democratic live-by-love humanity.

Oh Bibbles, oh Pips, oh Pipsey You little black love-bird!

_Don’t_ you love _everybody_! Just everybody. You love ’em all. Believe in the One Identity, don’t you, You little Walt-Whitmanesque bitch?

First time I lost you in Taos plaza, And found you after endless chasing, Came upon you prancing round the corner in exuberant, bibbling affection After the black-green skirts of a yellow-green old Mexican woman Who hated you, and kept looking round at you and cursing you in a mutter, While you pranced and bounced with love of her, you indiscriminating animal, All your wrinkled _miserere_ Chinese black little face beaming And your black little body bouncing and wriggling With indiscriminate love, Bibbles; I had a moment’s pure detestation of you.

As I rushed like an idiot round the corner after you Yelling: _Pips! Pips! Bibbles!_

I’ve had moments of hatred of you since, Loving everybody! “To you, whoever you are, with endless embrace!”-- That’s you, Pipsey, With your imbecile bit of a tail in a love-flutter. You omnipip.

Not that you’re merely a softy, oh dear me no. You know which side your bread is buttered. You don’t care a rap for anybody. But you love lying warm between warm human thighs, indiscriminate, And you love to make somebody love you, indiscriminate, You love to lap up affection, to wallow in it, And then turn tail to the next comer, for a new dollop.

And start prancing and licking and cuddling again, indiscriminate.

Oh yes, I know your little game.

Yet you’re so nice, So quick, like a little black dragon. So fierce, when the coyotes howl, barking like a whole little lion, and rumbling, And starting forward in the dusk, with your little black fur all bristling like plush Against those coyotes, who would swallow you like an oyster.

And in the morning, when the bedroom door is opened, Rushing in like a little black whirlwind, leaping straight as an arrow on the bed at the pillow And turning the day suddenly into a black tornado of _joie de vivre_, Chinese dragon.

So funny Lobbing wildly through deep snow like a rabbit, Hurtling like a black ball through the snow, Champing it, tossing a mouthful, Little black spot in the landscape!

So absurd Pelting behind on the dusty trail when the horse sets off home at a gallop: Left in the dust behind like a dust-ball tearing along Coming up on fierce little legs, tearing fast to catch up, a real little dust-pig, ears almost blown away, And black eyes bulging bright in a dust-mask Chinese-dragon-wrinkled, with a pink mouth grinning, under jaw shoved out And white teeth showing in your dragon-grin as you race, you split-face, Like a trundling projectile swiftly whirling up, Cocking your eyes at me as you come alongside, to see if I’m I on the horse, And panting with that split grin, All your game little body dust-smooth like a little pig, poor Pips.

Plenty of game old spirit in you, Bibbles. Plenty of game old spunk, little bitch.

How you hate being brushed with the boot-brush, to brush all that dust out of your wrinkled face, Don’t you? How you hate being made to look undignified, Ma’am; How you hate being laughed at, Miss Superb!

Blackberry face!

Plenty of conceit in you. Unblemished belief in your own perfection And utter lovableness, you ugly-mug; Chinese puzzle-face, Wrinkled underhung physiog that looks as if it had done with everything, Through with everything.

Instead of which you sit there and roll your head like a canary And show a tiny bunch of white teeth in your underhung blackness, Self-conscious little bitch, Aiming again at being loved.

Let the merest scallywag come to the door and you leap your very dearest-love at him, As if now, at last, here was the one you _finally_ loved, Finally loved; And even the dirtiest scallywag is taken in, Thinking: _This dog sure has taken a fancy to me_.

You miserable little bitch of love-tricks, I know your game.

Me or the Mexican who comes to chop wood All the same, All humanity is jam to you.

Everybody so dear, and yourself so ultra-beloved That you have to run out at last and eat filth, Gobble up filth, you horror, swallow utter abomination and fresh-dropped dung.

You stinker. You worse than a carrion-crow. Reeking dung-mouth. You love-bird.

_Reject nothing_, sings Walt Whitman. So you, you go out at last and eat the unmentionable, In your appetite for affection.

And then you run in to vomit it in my house! I get my love back. And I have to clean up after you, filth which even blind Nature rejects From the pit of your stomach; But you, you snout-face, you reject nothing, you merge so much in love You must eat even that.

Then when I dust you a bit with a juniper twig You run straight away to live with somebody else, Fawn before them, and love them as if they were the ones you had _really_ loved all along. And they’re taken in. They feel quite tender over you, till you play the same trick on them, dirty bitch.

Fidelity! Loyalty! Attachment! Oh, these are abstractions to your nasty little belly. You must always be a-waggle with LOVE. Such a waggle of love you can hardly distinguish one human from another. You love one after another, on one condition, that each one loves you most. Democratic little bull-bitch, dirt-eating little swine.

But now, my lass, you’ve got your Nemesis on your track, Now you’ve come sex-alive, and the great ranch-dogs are all after you. They’re after what they can get, and don’t you turn tail! You loved ’em all so much before, didn’t you, loved ’em indiscriminate. You don’t love ’em now. They want something of you, so you squeak and come pelting indoors.

Come pelting to me, now the other folk have found you out, and the dogs are after you. Oh yes, you’re found out. I heard them kick you out of the ranch house. _Get out, you little, soft fool!!_

And didn’t you turn your eyes up at me then? And didn’t you cringe on the floor like any inkspot! And crawl away like a black snail! And doesn’t everybody loathe you then! And aren’t your feelings violated, you high-bred little love-bitch!

For you’re sensitive, In many ways very finely bred. But bred in conceit that the world is all for love Of you, my bitch: till you get so far you eat filth. Fool, in spite of your pretty ways, and quaint, know-all, wrinkled old aunty’s face.

So now, what with great Airedale dogs, And a kick or two, And a few vomiting bouts, And a juniper switch, You look at me for discrimination, don’t you? Look up at me with misgiving in your bulging eyes, And fear in the smoky whites of your eyes, you nigger; And you’re puzzled, You think you’d better mind your P’s and Q’s for a bit, Your sensitive love-pride being all hurt.

All right, my little bitch. You learn loyalty rather than loving, And I’ll protect you. _Lobo._

MOUNTAIN LION

Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water sounds still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.

Men! Two men! Men! The only animal in the world to fear!

They hesitate. We hesitate. They have a gun. We have no gun.

Then we all advance, to meet.

Two Mexicans, strangers, emerging out of the dark and snow and inwardness of the Lobo valley. What are they doing here on this vanishing trail?

What is he carrying? Something yellow. A deer?

_Qué tiene, amigo?_ _León--_

He smiles, foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong. And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn’t know. He is quite gentle and dark-faced.

It is a mountain lion, A long, long slim cat, yellow like a lioness. Dead.

He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.

Lift up her face, Her round, bright face, bright as frost. Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears; And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays, Dark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face. Beautiful dead eyes.

_Hermoso es!_

They go out towards the open; We go on into the gloom of Lobo. And above the trees I found her lair, A hole in the blood-orange brilliant rocks that stick up, a little cave. And bones, and twigs, and a perilous ascent.

So, she will never leap up that way again, with the yellow flash of a mountain lion’s long shoot! And her bright striped frost face will never watch any more, out of the shadow of the cave in the blood-orange rock, Above the trees of the Lobo dark valley-mouth!