Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle.

And how he feels it!

The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker
through chaos,
The immune, the animate,
Enveloped in isolation,
Forerunner.
Now look at him!

Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation.
His adolescence saw him crucified into sex,
Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek
his consummation beyond himself.
Divided into passionate duality,
He, so finished and immune, now broken into
desirous fragmentariness,
Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself
In his effort toward completion again.

Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris,
The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into
pieces,
And he must struggle after reconstruction,
ignominiously.

And so behold him following the tail
Of that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse,
Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow,
But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank
persistence,
Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches
out to walk,
Roaming over the sods,
Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail
Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell.

Their two shells like doomed boats bumping,
Hers huge, his small;
Their splay feet rambling and rowing like
paddles,
And stumbling mixed up in one another,
In the race of love--
Two tortoises,
She huge, he small.

She seems earthily apathetic,
And he has a reptile's awful persistence.

I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mere
Tortue.
While I, I pity Monsieur.
"He pesters her and torments her," said the
woman.
How much more is _he_ pestered and tormented,
say I.

What can he do?
He is dumb, he is visionless,
Conceptionless.

His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not
As her earthen mound moves on,
But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery
skin,
Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell,
And drags at these with his beak,
Drags and drags and bites,
While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull
mound along.

TORTOISE GALLANTRY

Making his advances
He does not look at her, nor sniff at