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.