The tadpoles in the quiet bay of the brook are now far past the stage of inky black little wrigglers attached by their two little sticky pads to any stick or leaf, merely breathing through their gills, and lashing with their hair-fine cilia. A dark brown skin—really gold spots mottling the black—now proclaims the leopard frogs they will become.

Dark and wrinkled like a violet carnation,
Humbly crouched amid the moss, it breathes,
Still moist with love that descends the gentle slope
Of white buttocks to its embroidered edge.

Filaments like tears of milk have wept
Under the savage wind that drives them off
Through little clots of russet earth
To disappear where inclination led them.

Oft did my dream suck at its vent;
My soul, envious of physical coitus, made it
Its musky dripstone and its nest of sobs.

'Tis the swooning conch, the fondling flute,
The tube from which the heavenly praline drops,
A female Canaan cocooned in muggy air.

The result was that the scheduled execution of one of the most abominable criminals of the age degenerated into the largest orgy the world had seen since the second century before Christ. Respectable women ripped open their blouses, bared their breasts, cried out hysterically, threw themselves on the ground with skirts hitched high. The men's gazes stumbled madly over this landscape of straddling flesh; with quivering fingers they tugged to pull from their trousers their members frozen stiff by some invisible frost; they fell down anywhere with a groan and copulated in the most impossible positions and combinations: grandfather with virgin, odd-jobber with lawyer's spouse, apprentice with nun, Jesuit with Freemason's wife—all topsy-turvy, just as opportunity presented. The air was heavy with the sweet odor of sweating lust and filled with loud cries, grunts and moans from ten thousand human beasts. It was infernal.

It's nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue.

[Eve:] “What's the singing of the birds, Adam?”

[Adam:] “The birds themselves that become air. To sing is to spill oneself in drops of air, in threads of air, to tremble. Then the birds are ripe and their throat falls in leaves, and their leaves are soft, pungent, sometimes quick.”

[…]

[Eve:] “I want to sing! I have some stiffled air, an air of bird and me… I will sing!”

[Adam:] “You are always singing but don't realize it. You are just as water. The rocks don't realize it either and their silent minerals gather and sing, silently.”