WHEN did you start your
tricks
Monsieur?
What do you stand on such high legs
for?
Why this length
of shredded shank
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
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?
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.
That is your trick, your bit of
filthy magic:
Invisibility, and the anaesthetic power
To deaden my attention in your
direction.
But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.
Queer, how you stalk and prowl the
air
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,
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.
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
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.
They say you can’t help it.
If that is so, then I believe a
little in Providence pro —
tecting the innocent.
But it sounds so amazingly like
a slogan
A yell of
triumph as you snatch my scalp.
Blood, red blood
Super-magical
Forbidden
liquor.
I behold you stand
For a second enspasmed in
oblivion,
Obscenely
ecstasied
Sucking
live blood
My
blood.
Such silence, such suspended
transport.
Such
gorging,
Such
obscenity of trespass.
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.
Away with a paean of
derision
You winged
blood-drop.
Can I not overtake you?
Are you one too many for
me
Winged
Victory?
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.