Rift of Light
Page 5
I worried the matter for weeks, until I saw
the glow of eyes beyond my spindrift fire. Cats!
More beautiful cats than Dick Whittington knew!
I trained my Praetorian Guard, who labored
for rat, rat raw, rat on the run—
and not once in those long years
did they raise a claw against me.
Nay, I taught my Praetorians to dance!
My other enemies were sea lions, fierce
as those land lions that fright the Afric native.
Mine were fat and made of fat,
stumping along the beach like old sailors.
They tried to crush me like a cake,
not that I possessed a cake.
If I shot one brute, the others would break
into a chorus of such lamentation
I began to fear for my sanity.
When they abandoned that poor soul
to whatever sandy heaven is known to beasts,
I’d have to dig out the ball,
for of powder I had a fair supply;
yet lead was more valuable than gold.
Their delicate oil fatted my lamps.
The meat, if you could call it meat, was sweet and vile.
I read the Bible, for I had not the pen to write
what I might rather read. The Bible
is a hard mistress, and the Bible cannot forgive.
Each day I tore a page to wipe my passage,
beginning with Ecclesiastes.
In short, I converted. I became bishop
of the island congregation of Our Lady of Goats.
The faithful joined in a most liberal fellowship.
I gave communion with a broken bowl and wafers of turnip.
Aye, we believed in Abraham and sacrifice!
We ate whatever appealed to us. We loved
whoever appealed to us. And our God,
our God of Goats, was kind, for He blessed us
with many children. Their bleats
used to keep me awake, beyond the fussing
susurrus of the waves. He was a tolerant God,
the God of Goats, Who never bequeathed us
stone tablets with His laws.
(What is that jest Captain Rogers tells?
Ah, that Moses was the careless man
who broke all ten of the Commandments at once.)
If He had laws, we did not know them.
If He had laws, He did not punish us.
We were to be fruitful and multiply.
And so we were fruitful, and so we multiplied.
I almost was convinced our little daughter
was mine. I knew it could not be so,
though she did favor me about the beard.
When the Duke’s sailors rowed ashore,
they were certain I was a goat,
with my goaty hat and goaty beard—
aye, and my goaty head and my goaty eyes.
I was goatishly clad, and my religion was goatish,
down to my goat-bone tools.
One of my knives—I called him the Chopper—
can yet be seen at the Goldenhead, Buckingham Gate,
now pinched with rust, alas.
My frock coat began as the goats’, my smallclothes
began as the goats’, and whatever was the goats’
was mine—and whatever was mine was the goats’.
All this I could have told the English tars
(I should have said I was gouty,
not goaty); yet, when I made to speak,
all that emerged were squeaks and grunts,
bleats and awful cries. When I had a word,
often I found but half the word, the front or the back,
it hardly mattered. I was reduced
to the cannibal’s gesture! The barbarian’s index finger!
I should like to be thought a Natural Philosopher,
for I made any number of Surprizing Discoveries—
if only I remembered what they were!
I should have to study myself and scribble it all down.
Of but one thing am I certain, that my goats
thought themselves great controversialists;
and under a pimento tree
we held long philosophic dialogues—
but in whose tongue? The goats’, or mine,
or some hideous freak of both? My horned antagonists
were of the Epicurean School—nay, the Rebuttal School!
At last my English returned, and yet what has returned
is never the same. Often now,
when I am rocked in the arms of Morpheus,
I am consoled, not by my dairy maid from Fife,
nor by the Plymouth harridan I chanced to marry,
but by Mary, little Mary, whose eyes were blue,
the blue of the Pacific.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Logan has published ten collections of poetry and six books of essays and reviews. The Undiscovered Country won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, and Cambridge, England.
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