Monologues

JAGUAR

Nasal intonations of light and clicking tongues… publicity of windows stoning me with pent-up cries… smells of abattoirs… smells of long-dead meat.

Some day-end— while the sand is yet cozy as a blanket off the warm body of a squaw, and the jaguars are out to kill… with a blue-black night coming on and a painted cloud stalking the first star— I shall go alone into the Silence… the coiled Silence… where a cry can run only a little way and waver and dwindle and be lost.

  And there…
  where tiny antlers clinch and strain
  as life grapples in a million avid points,
  and threshing things
  strike and die,
  letting their hate live on
  in the spreading purple of a wound…
  I too
  will make covert of a crevice in the night,
  and turn and watch…
  nose at the cleft's edge.