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AND THE

ODALISQUE

SING, OH, SING, OF THE GRACEFUL GASELLI! Nimble and fleet are their boot-black feet, and sweet are their whistling songs! No shepherd , no hter than ours—than ours!—on the sheep-spotted fields of home!

We are the bringers of grace, we are the players of the goat-horn flutes, we are the fire-tenders in fields where hay has been bundled and wheeled But light up your carassy ground, sta our hooves to the sound of your wine-sped violas! But kindle a fla in fro in fro in froot on the rye, the wheat, the golden, glearain!

And if in theyou find your brother run off, if in the ht before, it is not our fault, we are but animals, and follow our bestial nature, as you do, as you do, else there would be no fires and no wine, no songs to thresh the —and ould our lives be then? Yes, we take one or two, but what do we give you? Fire and wine and songs in the ive as good as we take

Yes, sing for the Gaselli These areWe hunt the ca sweeter than any twanging country harp? Bet on it Are we lissoine they do? And are there one or two gone in the reen you shall know us, our green coats and our green skirts, trailing behind us so that only those who know to look will see those boot-black hooves a-glea And what befalls those lucky one or tho in the damp, ashen dawn are nowhere to be found?

All creatures under the Stars must eat, my dears

We are shepherds—to eat the sheep we tend would be an abooat would be obscene! How could you even suggest it? What perversion you describe! Be off with you, now, else you shall feel my hoof!

But wait Perhaps there was a Gaselli with hungers like the ones you expound Perhaps there was one who did not like the taste of girl, even less the taste of wiry Gypsy boy Perhaps he thought laht goat salty and soft to his neat, white teeth Perhaps his nalio, and perhaps he stands before you And it is not iine that after years of secret naw a bone or lap a wound, he was caught gorging himself on a little laiveness! What it was that caught me at my feast is hard and hard to believe

It was a cow This does not strain the mind, I am sure! But it was a cow the size of a barn, with eyes like the forked spaces between fla fair! Her flanks were dun-golden, sirl white, sohite, hite skin beneath Her hooves were bronze, her udder full and firm as a moon, her nose flared trumpet-wise, the breadth of her chest enorrass, graceful as a trained horse, and her hooves burned the earth where she stepped, sending up sighs of steam

There was a light about her, I tell you true It was not a glow, but a light that hung within her, like the shape of a second cow I fell before her, on my knees

“O Great Heifer of Heaven!” I cried, for my poetry had not leftyour children! But they were sweet, and I am weak!”

She regarded me calmly When she spoke her voice vibrated in my bones “I

eat Why should you not?”

“Because Gaselli eat dancers, not the flock We are to eat drunkards who cannot find their way hoh the mere—not a poor, defenseless coho never knehere hoin with”