Flower snake

A back road pungent with musk and mint.
So beautiful, that snake. . .
What huge griefs brought it to birth?
Such a repulsive body!

You look like a flowered silk gaiter ribbon!
With your crimson mouth where that eloquent tongue
by which your grandsire beguiled poor Eve
now silently flickers
look, a blue sky. . . Bite! Bite vengefully!

Run! Quick! That vile head!

Hurling stones, hurling, quickly there
headlong down the musky, grass-sweet road,
pursuing it
not because Eve was our grandsire's wife
yet desperate, gasping
as if after a draft of kerosene. . . yes, kerosene. . .

If I could only wrap you round me,
fixed on a needle's point;
far more gorgeous than any flowered silk. . .

Those lovely lips, blazing crimson,
as if you''d been sipping Cleopatra's blood. . .
sink in now, snake!

Our young Sunnee's all of twenty, with pretty lips, too,
like those of a cat. . . sink in now, snake!