Poem by David Herbert Lawrence

She-Goat

GOATS go past the back of the house like dry leaves in the
    dawn,
And up the hill like a river, if you watch.

At dusk they patter back like a bough being dragged on the
    ground,
Raising dusk and acridity of goats, and bleating.

Our old goat we tie up at night in the shed at the back of
    the broken Greek tomb in the garden,
And when the herd goes by at dawn she begins to bleat for
    me to come down and untie her.

Merr--err--err! Merr—er--errr! Mer! Mé!
Wait, wait a bit, I'll come when I've lit the fire.
Merrr!
Exactly.
Mé! Mer! Merrrrrrr!!!
Tace, tu, crapa, bestia!
Merr--ererrr--ererrrr! Merrrr!

She is such an alert listener, with her ears wide, to know
    am I coming!
Such a canny listener, from a distance, looking upwards,
    lending first one ear, then another.

There she is, perched on her manger, looking over the
    boards into the day
Like a belle at her window.

And immediately she sees me she blinks, stares, doesn't
    know me, turns her head and ignores me vulgarly with
    a wooden blank on her face.

What do I care for her, the ugly female, standing up there
    with her long tangled sides like an old rug thrown
    over a fence.
But she puts her nose down shrewdly enough when the knot
    is untied,
And jumps staccato to earth, a sharp, dry jump, still ignor-
    ing me,
Pretending to look round the stall.

Come on, you, crapa! I'm not your servant!

She turns her head away with an obtuse, female sort of
    deafness, bête.
And then invariably she crouches her rear and makes
    water.
That being her way of answer, if I speak to her.--Self-
    conscious!
Le bestie non parlano, poverine!

She was bought at Giardini fair, on the sands, for six
    hundred lire.

An obstinate old witch, almost jerking the rope from my
    hands to eat the acanthus, or bite at the almond buds,
    and make me wait.
Yet the moment I hate her she trips mild and smug like a
    woman going to mass.
The moment I really detest her.

Queer it is, suddenly, in the garden
To catch sight of her standing like some huge, ghoulish
    grey bird in the air, on the bough of the leaning
    almond-tree,
Straight as a board on the bough, looking down like
    some hairy horrid God the Father in a William Blake
    imagination.
Come down, crapa, out of that almond tree!

Instead of which she strangely rears on her perch in the
    air, vast beast.
And strangely paws the air, delicate,
And reaches her black-striped face up like a snake, far up,
Subtly, to the twigs overhead, far up, vast beast,
And snaps them sharp, with a little twist of her anaconda
    head;
All her great hairy-shaggy belly open against the morning.

At seasons she curls back her tail like a green leaf in the fire,
Or like a lifted hand, hailing at her wrong end.
And having exposed the pink place of her nakedness, fixedly,
She trots on blithe toes,
And if you look at her, she looks back with a cold, sardonic
    stare.
Sardonic, sardonyx, rock of cold fire.
See me? She says, That's me!

That's her.

Then she leaps the rocks like a quick rock.
Her back-bone sharp as a rock,
Sheer will.

Along which ridge of libidinous magnetism
Defiant, curling the leaf of her tail as if she were curling
    her lip behind her at all life.
Libidinous desire runs back and forth, asserting itself in that
    little lifted bare hand.

Yet she has such adorable spurty kids, like spurts of black
    ink.
And in a month again is as if she had never had them.

And when the billy goat mounts her
She is brittle as brimstone.
While his slitted eyes squint back to the roots of his ears.

1. Study
2. Irony
3. The Punisher
4. We Are Transmitters
5. He-Goat

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