The Killer

The day was clear as fire, the birds sang frail as glass, when thirsty I came to the creek and fell by its side in the grass. My breast on the bright moss and shower-embroidered weeks, my lips to the live water I saw him turn in the reeds. Black horror sprang from the dark in a violent birth, and through its cloth of grass I felt the clutch of earth. O beat him into the ground. O strike him till he dies- or else your life itself drains through those colourless eyes. I struck again and again Slender in black and red he lies, and his icy glance turns outward clear and dead. But nimble my enemy as water is, or wind. He has slipped from his death aside and vanished into my mind He has vanished whence he came, my nimble enemy; and the ants come out to the snake and drink at his shallow eye.