Ursula K. LeGuin - Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences

The hair begun to come away all over his body. It was like his hair fried away in the sunlight and was gone. He was white all over, then, like a worm's skin. And he turned his face. It was changing while I looked. It got flatter and flatter, the mouth flat and wide, and the teeth grinning flat and dull, and the nose just a knob of flesh with nostril holes, and the ears gone, and the eyes gone blue -- blue, with white rims around the blue -- staring at me out of that flat, soft, white face.

He stood up then on two legs.

I saw him, I had to see him, my own dear love, turned into the hateful one.

I couldn't move, but as I crouched there in the passage staring out into the day I was trembling and shaking with a growl that burst out into a crazy, awful howling. A grief howl and a terror howl and a calling howl. And the others heard it, even sleeping and woke up.

It stared and peered, that thing my husband had turned into, and shoved its face up to the entrance of our house. I was still bound by mortal fear, but behind me the children had waked up, and the baby was whimpering. The mother anger come into me then, and I snarled and crept forward.

The man thing looked around. It had no gun, like the ones from the man places do. But it picked up a heavy

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fallen tree-branch in its long white foot, and shoved the end of that down into our house, at me. I snapped the end of it in my teeth and started to force my way out, because I knew the man would kill our children if it could. But my sister was already coming. I saw her running at the man with her head low and her mane high and her eyes

yellow as the winter sun. It turned on her and raised up that branch to hit her. But I come out of the doorway, mad with the mother anger, and the others all were coming answering my call, the whole pack gathering, there in that blind glare and heat of the sun at noon.

The man looked round at us and yelled out loud, and brandished the branch it held. Then it broke and ran, heading for the cleared fields and plowlands, down the mountainside. It ran, on two legs, leaping and weaving and we followed it

I was last, because love still bound the anger and the fear in me. I was running when I saw them pull it down. My sister's teeth were in its throat I got there and it was dead. The others were drawing back from the kill, because of the taste of the blood, and the smell. The younger ones were cowering and some crying and my sister rubbed her mouth against her forelegs over and over to get rid of the taste. I went up close because I thought if the thing was dead the spell, the curse must be done, and my husband could come back -- alive, or even dead, if I could only see him, my true love, in his true form, beautiful. But only the dead man lay there white and bloody. We drew back and back from it, and turned and ran, back up into the hills, back to the woods of the shadows and the twilight and the blessed dark.

(1979)

Five Vegetable Poems

The first four of these poems have to do with threat and survival, fragility and toughness, what lasts and what can't last. I think Westerners may sometimes perceive plants a bit differently from those who grew up where water can be taken for granted. In the West, one is often forced to see the plants as quite contingent. By now, however, anybody anywhere who can take trees for granted probably also believes that the so-called shortage of bison on the Great Plains is a liberal conspiracy.

The fifth poem, "The Crown of Laurel," is what Adrienne Rich has called a re-visioning. Myths are one of our most useful techniques of living ways of telling the world, narrating reality, but in order to be useful they must (however archetypal and collectively human their structure) be retold; and the teller makes them over -- and over. Many women and some men are now engaged in what almost seems a shared undertaking of re-telling re-thinking the myths and tales we learned as children -fables, folktales, kgends, hero-stories, god-stories. So John Gardner in his brilliant novel Grendel (Beowulf as seen by the monsfer), and Anne Sexton's equally brilliant Transformations of folktales; and the work goes on, and this poem is part of it. Very often the re-visioning consists in a 'simple' change of point of view. It is possible that the very concept of point-of-view may be changing, may have to change, or to be changed, so that our reality can be narrated.

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76 JT BUFFALO GALS

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Torrey Pines Reserve (For Bob and Mary Elliott)

Ground dry as yellow bones.

A dust of sand, gold-mica-glittering.

Oh, dry! Grey ceanothus stems

twisted and tough; small flowers. A lizard place.

Rain rare and hard as an old woman's tears runnelled these faces of the cliffs.

Sandstone is softer than the salty wind; it crumbles, wrinkles, very old, vulnerable. Circles in the rock in hollows worn by ocean long ago.

These are eyes that were his pearls.

One must walk lightly; this is fragile. Hold to the thread of way. There's narrow place for us in this high place between the still desert and the stillness of the sea. This gentle wilderness.

The Torrey pines

grow nowhere else on earth.

Listen:

you can hear the lizards listening.

Lewis and Clark and After Always in the solemn company (save on the Desert Hains) of those great beings (we did not think much about it, trees by our tribe being seen with the one eye) we walked across a forest continent

Ohone! ohone! the deep groves, the high woods of Ohio! the fir-dark mountains, the silent lives, the forests, the forests of Oregon!

West Texas

Honor the lives of the terrible places: greasewood, rabbitbrush, prickly pear, yucca, swordfern, sagebrush, the dingy wild-eyed sheep alert and deer like shadows starting from the rock. In gait and grace and stubborn strength with delicate hoof or filament root, stonebreakers, lifebringers. Let there be rain for them.

(1985)

(1980)

(1973)

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The young fir in the back of the car

was silent, didn't admire the scenery,

took up residence without comment

in the high field near the old apple,

trading a two-foot pot for the Columbia Gorge.

When the wind came up, the branches said Ssshhh to it, but the trunk and roots were taciturn, and will be a hundred years from now, perhaps.

Where the glass bubbles and colored lights were, will be rain, and owls.

It won't hear carols sung again.

But then, it never listened.

The Crown of Laurel (1982)

He liked to feel my fingers in his hair.

So he pulled them off me, wove a wreath of them, and wears it at parades and contests, my dying fingers with their kitchen smell

interlocked around his sunny curls.

Sometimes he rests on me a while.

Aside from that, he seems to have lost interest

It wasn't to preserve my Virtue' that I ran! What's a nymph like me to do with something that belongs to men? It's just I wasn't in the mood. And he didn't care. It scared me.

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The little goadeg boys can't even talk, but still they wait till they can smell you feel like humping with a goadeg in the woods, rolling and scratching and laughing -- they can laugh! -- poor little hairycocks,

I miss them.

When we were tired of that kind of thing my sister nymphs and I would lie around, and talk, and tease, and stroke, and chase, and stretch out panting for another talk, and sleep in the warm shadows side by side under the leaves, and all was as we pleased.

And then the mortal hunters of the deer, the poachers, the deciduous shepherd-boys: they'd stop and gape and stare with owly eyes, not even hoping even when I smiled... New every spring like daffodils, those boys. But once for forty years I met one man up on the sheep-cropped hills of Arcady. I kissed his wrinkles, the ravines of time I cannot enter, gazing in his eyes, whose dark dimmed and deepened, seeing less always, till he died. I came to his burial. Among the villagers I walked behind his grey-haired wife. She could have been Time's wife, my grandmother.