Ginger

Am I the only one watching my neighbour’s frolicksome goat, Ginger, tied to a pecan tree? All morning it has been examining an empty bushel basket and has lifted one leg delicately like a circus horse as if to roll it, but whether to do that or to butt it with its small horns, that is the question. Not of great moment, no signing of the Charter, but like air music, quickest of the elements. Towards which I leaped! In form its own grace, appearing, as it passed in retrospect, classical. The real goat stayed, imperturbable, the body solid as a four-square loom and delivered me from abstraction. His coloring, greyish-soft shades, their dark and light passing into each other as in an antique rubbing. I now found myself sitting so near, my shade, as in the Inferno, sensed his, but he gave no sign of my presence, even when I stroked him and my heart leaped at the gentle fleece, too fine for a hard life. He continued nibbling on a dry bush. I would not have believed unconcern could bolster the man in me and be so enduring. Sic transit, not caring whether it is recognized, The Divine (from another age). He was poking into the underbush now and reached across my head for the small spiny twigs. At that the phase changed and a sensuous trembling hung in the air, as when a bee is about to descend on blossoming clover, and I felt myself being pulled as by a line from the invisible other side to enter goathood, deeper than sight.