yes, she can make haste when she likes.

She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great
mouthfuls,
Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron,
pristine face
Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth
Like sudden curved scissors,
And gulping at more than she can swallow, and
working her thick, soft tongue,
And having the bread hanging over her chin.

O Mistress, Mistress,
Reptile mistress,
Your eye is very dark, very bright,
And it never softens
Although you watch.

She knows,
She knows well enough to come for food,
Yet she sees me not;
Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything,
Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless,
Reptile mistress.

Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless
mouth,
She has no qualm when she catches my finger in
her steel overlapping gums,
But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking
are nothing to her,
She does not even know she is nipping me with
her curved beak.
Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag
it in horror away.

Mistress, reptile mistress,
You are almost too large, I am almost frightened.
He is much smaller,
Dapper beside her,
And ridiculously small.

Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look,
His, poor darling, is almost fiery.

His wimple, his blunt-prowed face,
His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long,
scaled, striving legs,
So striving, striving,
Are all more delicate than she,
And he has a cruel scar on his shell.

Poor darling, biting at her feet,
Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy,
splay feet,
Nipping her ankles,
Which she drags apathetic away, though without
retreating into her shell.

Agelessly silent,
And with a grim, reptile determination,
Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him,
serpents' long obstinacy
Of horizontal persistence.

Little old man
Scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his
opportunity,
Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and
seizing her scaly ankle,
And hanging grimly on,
Letting go at last as she drags away,
And closing his steel-trap face.

His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face.