Tortoises

Tortoise Shell

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Along the back of the baby tortoise

The scales are locked in an arch like a bridge,

Scale-lapping, like a lobster's sections

Or a bee's.

Then crossways down his sides

Tiger-stripes and wasp-bands.

Five, and five again, and five again,

And round the edges twenty-five little ones,

The sections of the baby tortoise shell.

It needed Pythagoras to see life placing her

counters on the living back

Of the baby tortoise;

Life establishing the first eternal mathematical

tablet,

Not in stone, like the Judean Lord, or bronze, but

in life-clouded, life-rosy tortoise-shell.

The first little mathematical gentleman

Stepping, wee mite, in his loose trousers

Under all the eternal dome of mathematical law.

Fives, and tens,

Threes and fours and twelves,

All the volte face of decimals,

The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven,

Turn him on his back,

The kicking little beetle,

And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching

belly,

The long cleavage of division, upright of the

eternal cross.

It goes right through him, the sprottling insect,

Through his cross-wise cloven psyche,

Through his five-fold complex-nature.

Outward and visible indication of the plan within,

The complex, manifold involvedness of an

individual creature

Blotted out

On this small bird, this rudiment,

This little dome, this pediment

Of all creation,

This slow one.

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