After the door shuts, and the footsteps die,
I call out, “Mother?”
The wind roars in the leaves: my cold hands,
curled Within my curled, cold body— my blurred head
Are warmed and tremble; and the red leaves flow
Like cells across the spectral, veined,
Whorled darkness of my vision. The red dwarf
Whispers, “The leaves are turning”; and I read
The dull, whorled notes, that tremble like a wish
Over the branched staves of the wood.
The wet, webbed leaves, the spidery limbs
Flap in the sodden wind,
And geese call from a hidden sky.
The rain falls steadily.
The stag is grazing in the wood. …
The soaked horn mutters. its dull notes
To the grey horizon; far away
The flat, gasped answer sounds and dies.
The rain’s sound grows into the roar
Of the flood below the falls; the rider calls
To the shape within the shades, a dwarf
Runs back into the brush. But smoke
Drifts to the gelding’s nostrils and he neighs.
From the wet starlight of the glade
A hut sends out its chink of fire.
The rider laughs out: in the branches, birds
Are troubled, stir.
On the hut’s stamped earth
A man squats by the waning fire.
The door’s hide is pushed open; he looks up
And slowly, with a kind of smile,
Acts out his own astonishment.
He gestures to his open mouth— the tongue
Is cut out; and he bares his shoulder, points
To the crown branded there, and grins. The hunter frowns.
The mute’s laugh bubbles like the pot
That stands in the embers; with harsh habitual
Impatience, the hunter questions him.
The man nods vacantly.
Shaken, he makes a bubbling sound
Over and over- till the king at last
Says no more, but ladles from the pot
Into a wooden bowl, the oily stew.
He eats silently; the mute
Counts spoonfuls on his fingers. Come to ten,
The last, little finger, he laughs out in joy
And runs like a mouse across the floor
To the door and the door’s darkness. And the king
Feels something squeeze his heart out in its hand
Till his own blood, half gall, half fire,
Breaks from him in great icy beads.
He springs up, his wrenched limbs convulse
Into a breaking bow. The vise of anguish holds
Him constant for one heart-beat, fails, he falls
Headlong— and, moaning, crawls
To the doorway, and with jerking hands
Pulls himself slowly up, looks out beyond
The rain-sodden forest, to the steady night:
Nothing. His grasp comes open, and he falls
Into a heap that draws some gasping breaths
Which slow, are intermittent, cease.
Now only the fire thinks, like a heart
Cut from its breast. Light leaps, the shadows fall
In the old alternation of the world;
And, over the set limbs, the Hunter wheels. …
Two sparks, at the dark horn of the window,
Look, as stars look, into the shadowy hut
Turn slowly, searching:
Then a bubbled, gobbling sound begins,
The sound of the kettle on the fire.
The kettle, overturned among the ashes,
Is cold as death.
Something is scratching, panting: a little voice
Says, “Let me, let me”; and the mute
Puts his arms around the dwarf and raises him.
They press their noses tight against the pane
And the small one sees. …
The pane is clouded with their soft slow breaths,
The mute’s arms tire; but they gaze on and on
Like children watching something wrong;
Their blurred faces, caught up in one wish,
Are blurred into one face: a child’s set face.
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