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Show //o away from Beauty and this place, away from this house, away from Davy and my mother and father. Time would pass, and in its passing I would lose all these poeple, as, sooner or later, I would lose everything. Finished with the oats, Beauty lifted her head and looked at me with calm dark eyes, and I touched her nose. She seemed to feel my mood. Did she know that she was not charmed to survive forever, that she was doomed? There have been times, oppressed with mortality, when I have wished that ihe right Shetland stallion had come along, some beautiful little high-stepping prince of a horse, an Apollo with glands all in order so that his small seed could ft help pass on fertile to new generations what in protoplasm Beauty possessed to pass on to this world, his seed really to fulfill that blind desire of hers/even if she didn't know when it was or when it wasn't fulfilled. 0 I might have found some t comfort in knowing that her issue was not all into a dead end. And yet in a deeper, more personal way it doesn't really matter, for Beauty was there, now touchy, now serene, now aloof, now responsive; and I was there, learning that we can love far more than we can possess, that we must, or perish. And now that she is long dead, now that she is rotted herself back ainto the earth, still she lives in my memory like some sweet, unheard melody, like the very promise of beauty and beauty's rest, indes-tructable, imperishable, immortal. |