SNAKE

A snake came to my water trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas 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 I must 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 honored?

I felt so honored.

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, honored 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 flickered 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 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 further,

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.

MEDLARS AND SORB-APPLES

I love you, rotten.

Delicious rottenness!

I love to suck you out from your skins,

So brown and soft and coming suave,

So morbid, as the Italians say.

What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour

Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay,

Stream within stream!

Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine

Or vulgar Marsala.

Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity

Now in the pussy-foot West.

What is it?

What is it in the grape turning raisin,

In the medlar, in the sorb-apple,

Wineskins of brown morbidity,

Autumnal excrementa,

What is it that reminds us of white gods?

Gods, nude as blanched nut-kernels,

Strangely, half sinisterly flesh-fragrant

As if with sweat,

And drenched with mystery?

Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.

I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences,

Orphic, delicate

Dionysos of the Underworld.

A kiss, and a vivid spasm of farewell, a moment’s orgasm of rupture,

Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning.

And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain,

A new gasp of further isolation,

A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying frost-cold leaves.

Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone,

The fibres of the heart parting one after the other,

And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly embodied,

Like a flame blown whiter and whiter

In a deeper and deeper darkness,

Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation.

So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples

The distilled essence of hell.

The exquisite fragrance of leave-taking. Jamque vale!¹

Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of Hell.

Each soul departing with its own isolation,

Strangest of all strange companions,

And best.

Medlars, sorb-apples,

More than sweet,

Flux of autumn,

Sucked out of your empty bladders

And sipped down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala

So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add its music to yours,

Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell,

And the ego sum² of Dionysos,

The sono io³ of perfect drunkenness,

Intoxication of final loneliness.

NOSTALGIA

The waning moon looks upward, this grey night

Sheers round the heavens in one smooth curve

Of easy sailing. Odd red wicks serve

To show where the ships at sea move out of sight.

This place is palpable me, for here I was born

Of this self-same darkness. Yet the shadowy house below

Is out of bounds, and only the old ghosts know

I have come—they whimper about me, welcome and mourn.

My father suddenly died in the harvesting corn,

And the place is no longer ours. Watching, I hear

No sound from the strangers; the place is dark, and fear

Opens my eyes till the roots of my vision seem torn.

Can I go nearer, never towards the door?

The ghosts and I, we mourn together, and shrink

In the shadow of the cart-shed—hovering on the brink

For ever, to enter the homestead no more.

Is it irrevocable? Can I really not go

Through the open yard-way? Can I not pass the sheds

And through to the mowie? Only the dead in their beds

Can know the fearful anguish that this is so.

I kiss the stones. I kiss the moss on the wall,

And wish I could pass impregnate into the place.

I wish I could take it all in a last embrace.

I wish with my breast I could crush it, perish it all.

ILLICIT

In front of the sombre mountains, a faint, lost ribbon of rainbow,

And between us and it, the thunder;

And down below, in the green wheat, the labourers

Stand like dark stumps, still in the green wheat.

You are near to me, and your naked feet in their sandals,

And through the scent of the balcony’s naked timber

I distinguish the scent of your hair; so now the limber

Lightning falls from heaven.

Adown the pale-green, glacier-river floats

A dark boat through the gloom—and whither?

The thunder roars. But still we have each other.

The naked lightnings in the heaven dither

And disappear. What have we but each other?

The boat has gone.

IN TROUBLE AND SHAME

I look at the sweeling sunset

And wish I could go also

Through the red doors beyond the black-purple bar.

I wish that I could go

Through the red doors where I could put off

My shame like shoes in the porch

My pain like garments,

And leave my flesh discarded lying

Like luggage of some departed traveller

Gone one knows not where.

Then I would turn round

And seeing my cast-off body lying like lumber,

I would laugh with joy.

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1 Jamque vale! ] Now farewell!

2 ego sum ] I am

3 sono io ] O I speak out