outstretched
          neck
     And giving that fragile yell, that scream,
     Super-audible,
     From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth,
     Giving up the ghost,
     Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.

     His scream, and his moment's subsidence,
     The moment of eternal silence,
     Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the
     sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once
     The inexpressible faint yell—
     And so on, till the last plasm of my body was
          melted back
     To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.

     So he tups, and screams
     Time after time that frail, torn scream
     After each jerk, the longish interval,
     The tortoise eternity,
     Agelong, reptilian persistence,
     Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the
          next spasm.

     I remember, when I was a boy,
     I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught
          with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting
          snake;
     I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break
          into sound in the spring;
     I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat
          of night
     Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters;
     I remember the first time, out of a bush in the
          darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and
          gurgles startled the depths of my soul;
     I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went
          through a wood at midnight;
     I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and
          blorting through the hours, persistent and
          irrepressible;
     I remember my first terror hearing the howl of
          weird, amorous cats;
     I remember the scream of a terrified, injured
          horse, the sheet-lightning
     And running away from the sound of a woman in
          labor, something like an owl whooing,
     And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a
          lamb,
     The first wail of an infant,
     And my mother singing to herself,
     And the first tenor singing of the passionate
          throat of a young collier, who has long since
          drunk himself to death,
     The first elements of foreign speech
     On wild dark lips.

     And more than all these,
     And less than all these,
     This last,
     Strange, faint coition yell
     Of the male tortoise at extremity,
     Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest
          far-off horizon of life.

     The cross,
     The wheel on which our silence first is broken,
     Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single
          inviolability, our deep silence
     Tearing a cry from us.

     Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling
          across the deeps, calling, calling for the
          complement,
     Singing, and calling, and singing again, being
          answered, having found.

     Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking
          for what is lost,
     The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ,
          the Osiris-cry of abandonment,
     That which is whole, torn asunder,
     That which is in part, finding its whole again
          throughout the universe.