I have seen twenty men hanged, hung myself Two in this jail, with whom I talked the night Before they had the rope, knotted behind The ear to break the neck. These two I hanged, One guilty and defiant, taking chops, Four cups of coffee just an hour before We swung him off; the other trembling, pale, Protesting innocence, but guilty too-- Both wore the same look in the middle watch. I tell you what it is: You take a steer, And windlass him to where the butcher stands With hammer ready for the blow and knife To slit the throat after the hammer falls, Well, there's a moment when the steer is standing Head, neck strained side-ways, eyes rolled side-ways too, Fixed, bright seen this way, but another way A film seems spreading on them. That's the look. They wear a corpse-like pallor, and their tongues Are loose, sprawl in their mouths, lie paralyzed Against their teeth, or fall back in their throats Which make them cough and stop for words and close Dry lips with little pops. There's something else: Their minds are out of them, like a rubber band Stretched from the place it's pinned, about to break. And all the time they try to draw it back, And give it utterance with that sprawling tongue, And lips too dry for words. They hold it tight As a woman giving birth holds to the sheet Tied to the bed's head, pulls the sheet to end The agony and the reluctance of the child That pauses, dreads to enter in this world. So was it with Fred Taylor. But before The high Court shook his hope, he talked to me Freely and fully, saying many times What could the world expect of him beside Some violence or murder? He had borrowed The books his lawyers used to fight for him, And read for hours and days about heredity. And in our talks he said: mix red and violet, You have the color purple. Strike two notes, You have a certain chord, and nature made me By rules as mathematical as they use In mixing drugs or gases. Then he'd say: Look at this table, and he'd show to me A diagram of chickens, how blue fowls Come from a cross of black with one of white With black splashed feathers. Look at the blues, he'd say. They mate, and of four chickens, two are blue, And one is black and one is white. These blues Produce in that proportion. But the black And white have chickens white and black, you see In equal numbers. Don't you see that I Was caught in mathematics, jotted down Upon a slate before I came to earth? They could have picked my forbears; on a slate Forecast my soul, its tendencies, if they Had been that devilish. And so he talked.