CREATURES

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 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 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! Siracusa.

Fish, oh Fish, So little matters! Whether the waters rise and cover the earth Or whether the waters wilt in the hollow places, All one to you. Aqueous, subaqueous, Submerged And wave-thrilled. As the waters roll Roll you. The waters wash, You wash in oneness And never emerge. Never know, Never grasp. Your life a sluice of sensation along your sides, A flush at the flails of your fins, down the whorl of your tail, And water wetly on fire in the grates of your gills; Fixed water-eyes. Even snakes lie together. But oh, fish, that rock in water, You lie only with the waters; One touch. No fingers, no hands and feet, no lips; No tender muzzles, No wistful bellies, No loins of desire, None. You and the naked element, Sway-wave. Curvetting bits of tin in the evening light. Who is it ejects his sperm to the naked flood? In the wave-mother? Who swims enwombed? Who lies with the waters of his silent passion, womb-element? —Fish in the waters under the earth. What price his bread upon the waters? Himself all silvery himself In the element No more. Nothing more. Himself, And the element. Food, of course! Water-eager eyes, Mouth-gate open And strong spine urging, driving; And desirous belly gulping. Fear also! He knows fear! Water-eyes craning, A rush that almost screams, Almost fish-voice As the pike comes.... Then gay fear, that turns the tail sprightly, from a shadow. Food, and fear, and joie de vivre, Without love. The other way about: Joie de vivre, and fear, and food, All without love. Quelle joie de vivre Dans l’eau! Slowly to gape through the waters, Alone with the element; To sink, and rise, and go to sleep with the waters; To speak endless inaudible wavelets into the wave; To breathe from the flood at the gills, Fish-blood slowly running next to the flood, extracting fish-fire; To have the element under one, like a lover; And to spring away with a curvetting click in the air, Provocative. Dropping back with a slap on the face of the flood. And merging oneself! To be a fish! So utterly without misgiving To be a fish In the waters. Loveless, and so lively! Born before God was love, Or life knew loving. Beautifully beforehand with it all. Admitted, they swarm in companies, Fishes. They drive in shoals. But soundless, and out of contact. They exchange no word, no spasm, not even anger. Not one touch. Many suspended together, forever apart, Each one alone with the waters, upon one wave with the rest. A magnetism in the water between them only. I saw a water-serpent swim across the Anapo, And I said to my heart, look, look at him! With his head up, steering like a bird! He’s a rare one, but he belongs ... But sitting in a boat on the Zeller lake And watching the fishes in the breathing waters Lift and swim and go their way— I said to my heart, who are these? And my heart couldn’t own them.... A slim young pike, with smart fins And grey-striped suit, a young cub of a pike Slouching along away below, half out of sight, Like a lout on an obscure pavement.... Aha, there’s somebody in the know! But watching closer That motionless deadly motion, That unnatural barrel body, that long ghoul nose, ... I left off hailing him. I had made a mistake, I didn’t know him, This grey, monotonous soul in the water, This intense individual in shadow, Fish-alive. I didn’t know his God, I didn’t know his God. Which is perhaps the last admission that life has to wring out of us. I saw, dimly, Once a big pike rush, And small fish fly like splinters. And I said to my heart, there are limits To you, my heart; And to the one God. Fish are beyond me. Other Gods Beyond my range ... gods beyond my God ... They are beyond me, are fishes. I stand at the pale of my being And look beyond, and see Fish, in the outerwards, As one stands on a bank and looks in. I have waited with a long rod And suddenly pulled a gold-and-greenish, lucent fish from below, And had him fly like a halo round my head, Lunging in the air on the line. Unhooked his gorping, water-horny mouth, And seen his horror-tilted eye, His red-gold, water-precious, mirror-flat bright eye; And felt him beat in my hand, with his mucous, leaping life-throb. And my heart accused itself Thinking: I am not the measure of creation. This is beyond me, this fish. His God stands outside my God. And the gold-and-green pure lacquer-mucus comes off in my hand, And the red-gold mirror-eye stares and dies, And the water-suave contour dims. But not before I have had to know He was born in front of my sunrise, Before my day. He outstarts me. And I, a many-fingered horror of daylight to him, Have made him die. Fishes, With their gold, red eyes, and green-pure gleam, and under-gold, And their pre-world loneliness, And more-than-lovelessness, And white meat; They move in other circles. Outsiders. Water-wayfarers. Things of one element. Aqueous, Each by itself. Cats, and the Neapolitans, Sulphur sun-beasts, Thirst for fish as for more-than-water; Water-alive To quench their over-sulphureous lusts. But I, I only wonder And don’t know. I don’t know fishes. In the beginning Jesus was called The Fish.... And in the end. Zell-am-See.

At evening, sitting on this terrace, When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara Departs, and the world is taken by surprise ... When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing Brown hills surrounding ... When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio A green light enters against stream, flush from the west, Against the current of obscure Arno ... Look up, and you see things flying Between the day and the night; Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together. A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches Where light pushes through; A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air. A dip to the water. And you think: “The swallows are flying so late!” Swallows? Dark air-life looping Yet missing the pure loop ... A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight And serrated wings against the sky, Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light, And falling back. Never swallows! Bats! The swallows are gone. At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats By the Ponte Vecchio ... Changing guard. Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one’s scalp As the bats swoop overhead! Flying madly. Pipistrello! Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe. Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive; Wings like bits of umbrella. Bats! Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep; And disgustingly upside down. Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags And grinning in their sleep. Bats! Not for me!

When I went into my room, at mid-morning, Say ten o’clock ... My room, a crash-box over that great stone rattle The Via de’ Bardi.... When I went into my room at mid-morning Why?... a bird! A bird Flying round the room in insane circles. In insane circles! ... A bat! A disgusting bat At mid-morning!... Out! Go out! Round and round and round With a twitchy, nervous, intolerable flight, And a neurasthenic lunge, And an impure frenzy; A bat, big as a swallow. Out, out of my room! The Venetian shutters I push wide To the free, calm upper air; Loop back the curtains.... Now out, out from my room! So to drive him out, flicking with my white handkerchief: Go! But he will not. Round and round and round In an impure haste, Fumbling, a beast in air, And stumbling, lunging and touching the walls, the bell-wires About my room! Always refusing to go out into the air Above that crash-gulf of the Via de’ Bardi, Yet blind with frenzy, with cluttered fear. At last he swerved into the window bay, But blew back, as if an incoming wind blew him in again. A strong inrushing wind. And round and round and round! Blundering more insane, and leaping, in throbs, to clutch at a corner, At a wire, at a bell-rope: On and on, watched relentless by me, round and round in my room, Round and round and dithering with tiredness and haste and increasing delirium Flicker-splashing round my room. I would not let him rest; Not one instant cleave, cling like a blot with his breast to the wall In an obscure corner. Not an instant! I flicked him on, Trying to drive him through the window. Again he swerved into the window bay And I ran forward, to frighten him forth. But he rose, and from a terror worse than me he flew past me Back into my room, and round, round, round in my room Clutch, cleave, stagger, Dropping about the air Getting tired. Something seemed to blow him back from the window Every time he swerved at it; Back on a strange parabola, then round, round, dizzy in my room. He could not go out, I also realised.... It was the light of day which he could not enter, Any more than I could enter the white-hot door of a blast-furnace. He could not plunge into the daylight that streamed at the window. It was asking too much of his nature. Worse even than the hideous terror of me with my handkerchief Saying: Out, go out!... Was the horror of white daylight in the window! So I switched on the electric light, thinking: Now The outside will seem brown.... But no. The outside did not seem brown. And he did not mind the yellow electric light. Silent! He was having a silent rest. But never! Not in my room. Round and round and round Near the ceiling as if in a web, Staggering; Plunging, falling out of the web, Broken in heaviness, Lunging blindly, Heavier; And clutching, clutching for one second’s pause, Always, as if for one drop of rest, One little drop. And I! Never, I say.... Go out! Flying slower, Seeming to stumble, to fall in air. Blind-weary. Yet never able to pass the whiteness of light into freedom ... A bird would have dashed through, come what might. Fall, sink, lurch, and round and round Flicker, flicker-heavy; Even wings heavy: And cleave in a high corner for a second, like a clot, also a prayer. But no. Out, you beast. Till he fell in a corner, palpitating, spent. And there, a clot, he squatted and looked at me. With sticking-out, bead-berry eyes, black, And improper derisive ears, And shut wings, And brown, furry body. Brown, nut-brown, fine fur! But it might as well have been hair on a spider; thing With long, black-paper ears. So, a dilemma! He squatted there like something unclean. No, he must not squat, nor hang, obscene, in my room! Yet nothing on earth will give him courage to pass the sweet fire of day. What then? Hit him and kill him and throw him away? Nay, I didn’t create him. Let the God that created him be responsible for his death ... Only, in the bright day, I will not have this clot in my room. Let the God who is maker of bats watch with them in their unclean corners.... I admit a God in every crevice, But not bats in my room; Nor the God of bats, while the sun shines. So out, out you brute!... And he lunged, flight-heavy, away from me, sideways, a sghembo! And round and round and round my room, a clot with wings, Impure even in weariness. Wings dark skinny and flapping the air, Lost their flicker. Spent. He fell again with a little thud Near the curtain on the floor. And there lay. Ah death, death You are no solution! Bats must be bats. Only life has a way out. And the human soul is fated to wide-eyed responsibility In life. So I picked him up in a flannel jacket, Well covered, lest he should bite me. For I would have had to kill him if he’d bitten me, the impure one.... And he hardly stirred in my hand, muffled up. Hastily, I shook him out of the window. And away he went! Fear craven in his tail. Great haste, and straight, almost bird straight above the Via de’ Bardi. Above that crash-gulf of exploding whips, Towards the Borgo San Jacopo. And now, at evening, as he flickers over the river Dipping with petty triumphant flight, and tittering over the sun’s departure, I believe he chirps, pipistrello, seeing me here on this terrace writing: There he sits, the long loud one! But I am greater than he ... I escaped him.... Florence.