Jaguar
Lola Ridge
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.
