| 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 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 |
| 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 protecting 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 estasied |
| 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 pæan 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 !
|
| D.H.
Lawrence |
Classic Poems |
| |
|
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