 | |
| |
| When did you start your tricks, |
| Monsieur? |
| |
| What do you stand on such high legs for? |
| Why this length of shredded shank, |
| 5 | You exaltation? |
| |
| Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards |
| And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me, |
| Stand upon me weightless, you phantom? |
| |
| I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory |
| 10 | In sluggish Venice. |
| You turn your head towards your tail, and smile. |
| |
| How can you put so much devilry |
| Into that translucent phantom shred |
| Of a frail corpus? |
| |
| 15 | Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs, |
| How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air, |
| A nothingness. |
| |
| Yet what an aura surrounds you; |
| Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind. |
| |
| 20 | That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: |
| Invisibility, and the anæsthetic power |
| To deaden my attention in your direction. |
| |
| But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer. |
| Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air |
| 25 | In circles and evasions, enveloping me, |
| Ghoul on wings |
| Winged Victory. |
| |
| Settle, and stand on long thin shanks |
| Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware, |
| 30 | You speck. |
| |
| I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air |
| Having read my thoughts against you. |
| |
| Come then, let us play at unawares, |
| And see who wins in this sly game of bluff. |
| 35 | Man or mosquito. |
| |
| You don't know that I exist, and I don't know that you exist. |
| Now then! |
| |
| It is your trump, |
| It is your hateful little trump, |
| 40 | You pointed fiend, |
| Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you: |
| It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear. |
| |
| Why do you do it? |
| Surely it is bad policy. |
| |
| 45 | They say you can't help it. |
| |
| If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent. |
| But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan |
| A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp. |
| |
| Blood, red blood |
| 50 | Super-magical |
| Forbidden liquor. |
| |
| I behold you stand |
| For a second enspasmed in oblivion, |
| Obscenely ecstasied |
| 55 | Sucking live blood |
| My blood. |
| |
| Such silence, such suspended transport, |
| Such gorging, |
| Such obscenity of trespass. |
| |
| 60 | You stagger |
| As well as you may. |
| Only your accursed hairy frailty, |
| Your own imponderable weightlessness |
| Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching. |
| |
| 65 | Away with a pæan of derision |
| You winged blood-drop. |
| |
| Can I not overtake you? |
| Are you one too many for me |
| Winged Victory? |
| 70 | Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you? |
| |
| Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes |
| Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you! |
| Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into! |
| |
| Siracusa. |
