The Serpent of Stars by Jean Giono

because it has found him:
    . . . not at all thorny
and supple as silk, and very light on the two springs of his legs.
And his arms are like two wings that tickle without beating me.
    It accompanied man in a strange search, full of leaps and slides flat on the stomach, of breathless races. Finally, the man found what he was looking for: his female. She was there:
    naked, hidden in the grass like a frog.
    And there was the chase, angular and quick as a flash of lightning, and then the man seized the female. And there, the wind saw nothing more because the two bodies pulled each other down under the shelter of the bushes, in the grass.
    The Sardinian calls the Grass.
    The Grass has seen it all and tells it all. It tells it, without fear of words and things. It’s all men here, and what took place in the shelter of the bushes is the act of life, as simple, as pure as the swelling of a cloud.
    The Grass uses a beautiful word to speak of the man’s actions; he uses “pastéjavo” which means, “he kneaded the dough.”
    And the Grass saw the slow life of the couple and those hours of dreaming in which, more than the beasts, these new creatures remained there, motionless, and:
    went off into the depths of the hour
on a serpent’s back.
    One day:
    Then, from each side of his female
he hollowed two great streams.
And there she was like a spring,
there she was like a fountain of children;
and the children flowed from her like the stream from the fountain.
    And the last ones are still there crawling close to her like fresh nuts, while, already on their two feet the first ones have arrived at the edge of the forest, before the world, and in their thick hands, they carry the fruit of fire.
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    The Grass’ account was the peak of the drama. If someday the Sardinian must be defeated, I hope—and he himself hopes—that his
replacement will be the shepherd who spoke the words of the Grass for us.
    When he had finished speaking, the Sardinian approached him, his hand extended. They shook hands two or three times and the Sardinian said, “Bravo! . . .”
    This shepherd is an assistant for the herd for which the Sardinian is the master.
    After the Grass came the Rain. That one told us all it knew of man’s exterior:
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    Because I’ve encountered him many times!
    And because there is not a fold, not a groove in his body which I have not kissed.
    He has:
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    A head like that stone which makes fire
    and the power that makes hillocks of his chest and his legs and his arms, it comes from within his head.
    And the female:
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    Some are as lively as little mice
    and they are like the fruit of the thyme, that little green star soft with honey, but with a bitterness that swells the tongue.
    I run over her as over the naked hills but I never go farther than her belly because a fire is hidden there, hotter than the fire of the sun.
    The one that will tell us of man’s interior is the Cold. That one has entered, has gone within to the inside of man, all the way to:

    That place where life and death are welded together: to that welded place where there is a roll of flesh like in those earthworms which have been cut and which have grown back together.
    Inside man it has seen:
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    Stars and suns, and huge shooting stars which bring fire to all the corners and the beautiful shepherd’s stars which climb in the calm of peace.
    A vast sky, all blue like the sky of earth, with a sun, storms, and great, spiteful flashes of lightening.
    And quantities of stars that go off in all directions, herds here, herds there, in the great turmoil of joy, when he approaches his female.
    The Cold has seen the whole interior of man like a sky full of powers. The Beast who comes next will say that he is:
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    like a pot full of honey which overflows, and which nourishes with its overflow a whole tribe of flies.
    For us, he is like a great tree we desire after a long trot in the sun.
    He is like