DOROTHEA TANNING
A
Life of Crime: St. Julien l'Hospitalier
In awe and transport what pregnant queen would not
hold dear the augur's words, "Your son will be a saint."?
She told no one.
The boy galloped his horse beside his father.
"Some day you will be king." Kneeling on Sunday
after Sunday in chapel,
watching the mouse by his hole in the wall
and bored, bored; idly, with his little sword
he severed its nose
and the drop of hlood was a drunken ocean, red
without anger, red without even lust, a blindness
of da wn
to
sca rlct
sunset, a birth of death fluttering down
with the castle's birds to moat and muck, a kind
of childish prologue
to the man's arrows dards knives javelins aimed
at everything that moved and would move no more
in forest and desert.
What breathlessness, what sluicing ecstasy
in the red flowing from feather from fur from skin
from eye-socket!
Did he taste the red salt in his own red gullet?
Did the martyred beast and plummeted bird ravish
his austere will?
Each time, oh, each time with each convulsion
it was as if he slavered like a Cerberus obeying
an implacable master
of carnage in The Peaceable Kingdom, felled
one by one with their death throes, their agonies.
Until the black stag,
