Too Much
A Roman had an
artist, a freedman,
contrive a cone — pine-cone
or fir-cone — with holes for a fountain. Placed on
the Prison of St. Angelo, this cone
of the Pompeys which is known
now as the Popes', pa**ed
for art. A huge cast
bronze, dwarfing the peaco*k
statue in the garden of the Vatican,
it looks like a work of art made to give
to a Pompey, or native
of Thebes. Others could
build, and understood
making colossi and
how to use slaves, and kept crocodiles and put
baboons on the necks of giraffes to pick
fruit, and used serpent magic.
They had their men tie
hippopotami
and bring out dappled dog-
cats to course antelopes, dikdik, and ibex;
or used small eagles. They looked on as theirs,
impalas and onigers,
the wild ostrich herd
with hard feet and bird
necks rearing back in the
dust like a serpent preparing to strike, cranes,
mongooses, storks, anoas, Nile geese;
and there were gardens for these —
combining planes, dates,
limes, and pomegranates,
in avenues — with square
pools of pink flowers, tame fish, and small frogs. Besides
yarns dyed with indigo, and red cotton,
they had a flax which they spun
into fine linen
cordage for yachtsmen.
These people liked small things;
they gave to boys little paired playthings such as
nests of eggs, ichneumon and snake, paddle
and raft, badger and camel;
and made toys for them-
selves: the royal totem;
and toilet-boxes marked
with the contents. Lords and ladies put goose-grease
paint in round bone boxes — the pivoting
lid incised with a duck-wing
or reverted duck-
head; kept in a buck
or rhinoceros horn,
the ground horn; and locust oil in stone locusts.
It was a picture with a fine distance;
of drought, and of a**istance
in time, from the Nile
rising slowly, while
the pig-tailed monkey on
slab-hands, with arched-up slack-slung gait, and the brown
dandy looked at the jasmine two-leafed twig
and bud, cactus-pads, and fig.
Dwarfs here and there, lent
to an evident
poetry of frog grays,
duck-egg greens, and egg-plant blues, a fantasy
and a verisimilitude that were
right to those with, everywhere,
power over the poor.
The bees' food is your
food. Those who tended flower-
beds and stables were like the king's cane in the
form of a hand, or the folding bedroom
made for his mother of whom
he was fond. Princes
clad in queens' dresses,
calla or petunia
white, that trembled at the edge, and queens in a
king's underskirt of fine-twilled thread like silk-
worm gut, as bee-man and milk-
maid, kept divine cows
and bees; limestone brows,
and gold-foil wings. They made
basalt serpents and portraits of beetles; the
king gave his name to them and he was named
for them. He feared snakes, and tamed
Pharaoh's rat, the rust-
backed mongoose. No bust
of it was made, but there
was pleasure for the rat. Its restlessness was
its excellence; it was praised for its wit;
and the jerboa, like it,
a small desert rat,
and not famous, that
lives without water, has
happiness. Abroad seeking food, or at home
in its burrow, the Sahara field-mouse
has a shining silver house
of sand. O rest and
joy, the boundless sand,
the stupendous sand-spout,
no water, no palm-trees, no ivory bed,
tiny cactus; but one would not be he
who has nothing but plenty.
Abundance
African*s meant
the conqueror sent
from Rome. It should mean the
untouched: the sand-brown jumping-rat — free-born; and
the blacks, that choice race with an elegance
ignored by one's ignorance.
Part terrestrial,
and part celestial,
Jacob saw, cudgel staff
in claw-hand — steps of air and air angels; his
friends were the stones. The translucent mistake
of the desert, does not make
hardship for one who
can rest and then do
the opposite — launching
as if on wings, from its match-thin hind legs, in
daytime or at night; with the tail as a weight,
undulated out by speed, straight.
Looked at by daylight,
the underside's white,
though the fur on the back
is buff-brown like the breast of the fawn-breasted
bower-bird. It hops like the fawn-breast, but has
chipmunk contours — perceived as
it turns its bird head —
the nap directed
neatly back and blending
with the ear which reiterates the slimness
of the body. The fine hairs on the tail,
repeating the other pale
markings, lengthen until
at the tip they fill
out in a tuft — black and
white; strange detail of the simplified creature,
fish-shaped and silvered to steel by the force
of the large desert moon. Course
the jerboa, or
plunder its food store,
and you will be cursed. It
honors the sand by a**uming its color;
closed upper paws seeming one with the fur
in its flight from a danger.
By fifths and sevenths,
in leaps of two lengths,
like the uneven notes
of the Bedouin flute, it stops its gleaning
on little wheel castors, and makes fern-seed
foot-prints with kangaroo speed.
Its leaps should be set
to the flageolet;
pillar body erect
on a three-cornered smooth-working Chippendale
claw — propped on hind legs, and tail as third toe,
between leaps to its burrow.