BIRDS

You ruffled black blossom, You glossy dark wind. Your sort of gorgeousness, Dark and lustrous And skinny repulsive And poppy-glossy, Is the gorgeousness that evokes my most puzzled admiration. Your aboriginality Deep, unexplained, Like a Red Indian darkly unfinished and aloof, Seems like the black and glossy seeds of countless centuries. Your wattles are the colour of steel-slag which has been red-hot And is going cold, Cooling to a powdery, pale-oxydised sky-blue. Why do you have wattles, and a naked, wattled head? Why do you arch your naked-set eye with a more-than-comprehensible arrogance? The vulture is bald, so is the condor, obscenely, But only you have thrown this amazing mantilla of oxydised sky-blue And hot red over you. This queer dross shawl of blue and vermilion, Whereas the peacock has a diadem. I wonder why. Perhaps it is a sort of uncanny decoration, a veil of loose skin. Perhaps it is your assertion, in all this ostentation, of raw contradictoriness. Your wattles drip down like a shawl to your breast And the point of your mantilla drops across your nose, unpleasantly. Or perhaps it is something unfinished A bit of slag still adhering, after your firing in the furnace of creation. Or perhaps there is something in your wattles of a bull’s dew-lap Which slips down like a pendulum to balance the throbbing mass of a generous breast, The over-drip of a great passion hanging in the balance. Only yours would be a raw, unsmelted passion, that will not quite fuse from the dross. You contract yourself, You arch yourself as an archer’s bow Which quivers indrawn as you clench your spine Until your veiled head almost touches backward To the root-rising of your erected tail. And one intense and backward-curving frisson Seizes you as you clench yourself together Like some fierce magnet bringing its poles together. Burning, pale positive pole of your wattled head! And from the darkness of that opposite one The upstart of your round-barred, sun-round tail! Whilst between the two, along the tense arch of your back Blows the magnetic current in fierce blasts, Ruffling black, shining feathers like lifted mail, Shuddering storm wind, or a water rushing through. Your brittle, super-sensual arrogance Tosses the crape of red across your brow and down your breast As you draw yourself upon yourself in insistence. It is a declaration of such tension in will As time has not dared to avouch, nor eternity been able to unbend Do what it may. A raw American will, that has never been tempered by life; You brittle, will-tense bird with a foolish eye. The peacock lifts his rods of bronze And struts blue-brilliant out of the far East. But watch a turkey prancing low on earth Drumming his vaulted wings, as savages drum Their rhythms on long-drawn, hollow, sinister drums. The ponderous, sombre sound of the great drum of Huichilobos In pyramid Mexico, during sacrifice. Drum, and the turkey onrush Sudden, demonic dauntlessness, full abreast, All the bronze gloss of all his myriad petals Each one apart and instant. Delicate frail crescent of the gentle outline of white At each feather-tip So delicate; Yet the bronze wind-well suddenly clashing And the eye over-weening into madness. Turkey-cock, turkey-cock Are you the bird of the next dawn? Has the peacock had his day, does he call in vain, screecher, for the sun to rise? The eagle, the dove, and the barnyard rooster, do they call in vain, trying to wake the morrow? And do you await us, wattled father, Westward? Will your yell do it? Take up the trail of the vanished American Where it disappeared at the foot of the crucifix. Take up the primordial Indian obstinacy, The more than human, dense insistence of will, And disdain, and blankness, and onrush, and prise open the new day with them? The East a dead letter, and Europe moribund.... Is that so? And those sombre, dead, feather-lustrous Aztecs, Amerindians, In all the sinister splendour of their red blood sacrifices, Do they stand under the dawn, half-godly, half-demon, awaiting the cry of the turkey-cock? Or must you go through the fire once more, till you’re smelted pure, Slag-wattled turkey-cock, Dross-jabot? Fiesole.

I can imagine, in some otherworld Primeval-dumb, far back In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed, Humming-birds raced down the avenues. Before anything had a soul, While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate, This little bit chipped off in brilliance And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems. I believe there were no flowers, then In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation. I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak. Probably he was big As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big. Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster. We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time, Luckily for us. Española.

Towards the sun, towards the south-west A scorched breast. A scorched breast, breasting the sun like an answer, Like a retort. An eagle at the top of a low cedar-bush On the sage-ash desert Reflecting the scorch of the sun from his breast; Eagle, with the sickle dripping darkly above. Erect, scorched-pallid out of the hair of the cedar, Erect, with the god-thrust entering him from below, Eagle gloved in feathers In scorched white feathers In burnt dark feathers In feathers still fire-rusted; Sickle-overswept, sickle dripping over and above. Sun-breaster, Staring two ways at once, to right and left; Masked-one Dark-visaged Sickle-masked With iron between your two eyes; You feather-gloved To the feet; Foot-fierce; Erect one; The god-thrust entering you steadily from below. You never look at the sun with your two eyes. Only the inner eye of your scorched broad breast Looks straight at the sun. You are dark Except scorch-pale-breasted; And dark cleaves down and weapon-hard downward curving At your scorched breast, Like a sword of Damocles, Beaked eagle. You’ve dipped it in blood so many times That dark face-weapon, to temper it well, Blood-thirsty bird. Why do you front the sun so obstinately, American eagle? As if you owed him an old, old grudge, great sun: or an old, old allegiance. When you pick the red smoky heart from a rabbit or a light-blooded bird Do you lift it to the sun, as the Aztec priests used to lift red hearts of men? Does the sun need steam of blood do you think In America, still, Old eagle? Does the sun in New Mexico sail like a fiery bird of prey in the sky Hovering? Does he shriek for blood? Does he fan great wings above the prairie, like a hovering, blood-thirsty bird? And are you his priest, big eagle Whom the Indians aspire to? Is there a bond of bloodshed between you? Is your continent cold from the ice-age still, that the sun is so angry? Is the blood of your continent somewhat reptilian still, That the sun should be greedy for it? I don’t yield to you, big, jowl-faced eagle. Nor you nor your blood-thirsty sun That sucks up blood Leaving a nervous people. Fly off, big bird with a big black back, Fly slowly away, with a rust of fire in your tail, Dark as you are on your dark side, eagle of heaven. Even the sun in heaven can be curbed and chastened at last By the life in the hearts of men. And you, great bird, sun-starer, heavy black beak Can be put out of office as sacrifice bringer. Taos.

The blue jay with a crest on his head Comes round the cabin in the snow. He runs in the snow like a bit of blue metal, Turning his back on everything. From the pine-tree that towers and hisses like a pillar of shaggy cloud Immense above the cabin Comes a strident laugh as we approach, this little black dog and I. So halts the little black bitch on four spread paws in the snow And looks up inquiringly into the pillar of cloud, With a tinge of misgiving. Ca-a-a! comes the scrape of ridicule out of the tree. What voice of the Lord is that, from the tree of smoke? Oh Bibbles, little black bitch in the snow, With a pinch of snow in the groove of your silly snub nose. What do you look at me for? What do you look at me for, with such misgiving? It’s the blue jay laughing at us. It’s the blue jay jeering at us, Bibs. Every day since the snow is here The blue jay paces round the cabin, very busy, picking up bits, Turning his back on us all, And bobbing his thick dark crest about the snow, as if darkly saying: I ignore those folk who look out. You acid-blue metallic bird, You thick bird with a strong crest Who are you? Whose boss are you, with all your bully way? You copper-sulphate blue-bird! Lobo.