168 PA RT T W O
And stripes on the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays,
Dark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face.
Beautiful dead eyes.
Hermoso es!
They go out towards the open;
We go on into the gloom of Lobo.Ecstasy drives his rave for her “face, / Her round, bright face, bright as
frost. /... the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays, / Dark, keen,
fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face.” Too much incantatory energy has
built up to end here.
As in “Snake,” Lawrence presses toward the source he always sought,
whether in nature or humankind.
And above the trees I found her lair,
A hole in the blood-orange brilliant rocks that stick up, a little cave.
And bones, and twigs, and a perilous ascent.
So, she will never leap up that way again, with the yellow flash of a
mountain lion’s long shoot!
And her bright striped frost-face will never watch any more,
out of the shadow of the cave in the blood-orange rock,
Above the trees of the Lobo dark valley-mouth.In a dark hole like the snake ’s, fascinating, secret, the sexual richness of “blood-
orange” twice over and “the yellow flash” signal some sort of revelation, akin
to Blake ’s “Tyger, tyger burning bright, / In the forests of the night!”
Strangely enough, not even looking into the cave,
Instead, I look out.
And out to the dim of the desert, like a dream, never real,
to the Sangre de Cristo range, snow-covered year round, and Picoris, an Indian
pueblo, and “green trees motionless standing in snow.” Unlike Hemingway,
Lawrence was no hunter, so the death of a singular puma rakes his mind, like
the snake ’s retreat.
And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a
mountain lion.
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million
or two of humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white-frost face of that
slim yellow mountain lion!A fifth time now he calls up her frost face. Think of Hemingway’s “Snows of
Kilimanjaro,” wondering “what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.” Or