he’s right behind me, hissing.
Although I know I risk my neck
each time I pass I stare
into the gopher hole to check
for signs the rattler’s there.
I see the gopher’s pile of dirt
with like rope-marks dragged through
and I’m at once on the alert
for the killer of the two.
Is it perverse of me to start
each morning as I pass the hole
with a sudden pounding of my heart,
my fear out of control,
my Adam’s apple in a vice
so scared that I mistake
the rattle of my thermos ice
for the angry rattlesnake ?
I’ve started when a pine twig broke
or found I’d only been afraid
of some broken branch of dead live-oak
zig-zagged with sun and shade.
But if some barely starts to sway
against the movement of the breeze
and most blades lean the other way
that’s when you’d better freeze.
If you’ve dragged a garden hose
through grass that’s one foot tall
that’s the way the rattler goes
if you catch a glimpse at all.
I killed snakes once, about a score
in Africa and in Brazil
yet they filled me with such awe
it seemed gross sacrilege to kill.
Once with matchet and domestic broom
I duelled with a hooded snake
with frightened children in the room
and all our lives at stake.
The snake and I swayed to and fro.
I swung the broom. Her thick hood spread.
I jabbed the broom. She rode the blow
and I hacked off her hooded head.
Then I lopped this ‘laithly worm’
and sliced the creature into nine
reptilian lengths that I saw squirm
as if still one connected spine.
The gaps between the bits I’d lopped
seemed supple snake though made of air
so that I wondered where life stopped
and if death started, where?
Since that time I’ve never killed
any snake that’s come my way
between the wild land and the tilled
where I walk every day
towards my woodland writing shed,
my heart mysteriously stirred
if I get a glimpse of tail or head
or think its rattle’s what I heard
when it’s only a cicada’s chirr
that grates on my cocked ear
not the hidden it/him/her
it so scares me to hear.
I’ve tried at last to come to terms
and deal only through my craft
with this laithliest of laithly worms
with poison fore, grim music aft
that makes my heart jam up my throat
and fills me with fear and wonder
as at the sound made when Der Tod
(in Strasbourg) schlägt die Stunde.
The sainted heroes of the Church
beheaded serpents who stood for
the Mother whose name they had to smirch
to get their own foot in the door.
We had to fight you to survive:
Darkness versus Light!
Now I want you on my land alive
and I don’t want to fight.
Smitten by Jehovah’s curses:
On thy belly thou must go!
I don’t think Light is what you’re versus
though the Bible tells me so.
I’ve seen you basking in the sun.
I’ve seen you entering the earth.
Darkness and Light to you are one.
You link together death and birth.
The Bible has another fable
that almost puts us on a par,
how God smote low ambitious Babel
for trying to reach too far.
From being once your mortal foe
and wanting all your kind to die
because the Bible told me so,
I now almost identify.
equivalent for looking glass,
when I walk here draw back your fangs
and let your unlikely ally pass.
I’m walking to my shed to write
and work out how they’re linked
what’s called the Darkness and the Light
before we all become extinct.
Laithly, maybe, but Earth-lover,
unmolested, let me go.
so my struggles might discover
what you already know.
As the low-flying fire-patrol
makes the slash and live-oaks sway
I go past the deep-dug gopher hole
where I hope my snake will stay
and stay forever if it likes.
I swear no one on this land will kill
the rattlesnake unless it strikes
then, I give my word, I will.
This fire-gap we trim with care
and mow short twice a year
is where we sometimes spot a hare,
a polecat, snake or deer.
They’re off so fast one scarcely sees
retreating scut or tail
before they’re lost among the trees
and they’ve thrown you off their trail.
But there’s one who doesn’t make
quick dashes for the undergrowth
nor bolts for the barley, that’s the snake
whose length can bridge them both.
I’ve seen it span the fire-gap,
its whole six feet stretched out,
the wild touched by its rattle tip,
the tilled field by its snout.
Stretched out where the scrub’s been mown
the rattler’s lordly manner
treats the earth as all its own,
gap, cereals, savannah.
Best keep to my land if you’re wise.
Once you cross my boundary line
the Bible-belters exorcize
all traces of the serpentine,
from Satan plain to demon drink
the flesh you’re blamed for keeping hot,
all earth-embracing snakes that slink
whether poisonous or not,
the fairy, pacifist, the Red,
maybe somebody who loves the Muse
are all forms of the serpent’s head
their God tells them to bruise,
The God invoked in Titusville
on last night’s local news
against the enemies they’d kill
with the blessed and baptised Cruise.
I fear they’re not the sort to see,
these Christians of the South,
the only real eternity
is a tale (like your tail) in the mouth.
Following Pine
I
When a plumber glues some lengths of PVC
that pipe our cold spring water from its source,
or a carpenter fits porch-posts, and they see,
from below or from above, the heartwood floors
made from virgin lumber, such men say,
as if they’d taught each other the same line:
Boards like them boards don’t exist today!
then maybe add: Now everything’s new pine.
Though the house is in a scant surviving wood
that has black walnut, hackberry, pecan
and moss-festooned live-oaks that have withstood
centuries more of bad news than a man,
sometimes we can drive an hour or more
and see nothing but dense pine trees on both sides
and no glimpse of the timbers for such floors
from virgi
n forest laid for virgin brides.
The feller/buncher and delimber groans,
grappling the grovelling pines, and dozing flat
a whole stand to a mess of stumps and stones
like some Goliath gorged on them, then shat
what was no use to him back on the land.
The sun and moon are sharing the same sky
as we drive by this totally depleted stand
marked down for GP planks and layer-peeled ply.
We’d set off early but shrill loggers’ saws
were already shrieking in the stands of pines.
Fresh-felled, lopped slash pine tree-trunks in their scores
were being bull-dozed into ordered lines
waiting for the trucks in long convoy.
The trimmed-off branches were already burning.
The quiet, early road we’d wanted to enjoy
we did, but met the timber trucks returning.
Our early start was so that we could get
the trees we’d gone to buy into the ground,
watered and well-mulched, before sunset,
and not be digging in the dark with snakes around.
So with fig-trees, vines, and apples in the back,
wilting and losing their Tree Garden sheen,
we see on the road ahead a sky half black
and half as brilliantly blue as it had been.
The fast track was all wet, the crawler lane
we’d driven in most of the morning, dry.
The west side was in sun, the east in rain.
The east had black, the west had bright blue sky.
Armadillo blood, on the one side, ’s washed away,
and, on the other, further on, sun-dried,
according as the car-crushed creature lay
on the highway’s wet or sunny side.
Killed by traffic flowing through the night,
armadillos, rats, snake, dog, racoon,
dead on both road verges, left and right,
are scavenged on and half-decayed by noon,
and browsed over with hummed hubbub by blowfly
like loud necklaces, beads gone berserk,
that, whatever the day’s weather, wet or dry,
stay a high gloss green and do their work.
And as we accelerated fast and overtook,
moving on the rain side as we did,
first one and then another timber truck,
the sudden wet road made me scared we’d skid.
My heart leaped instantly into my mouth
till we seemed safe between two loads of pine,
part of that convoy travelling due South
with east lane raining, and west side fine.
Was it the danger that made me hold my breath,
the quick injection of adrenalin,
the vision of our simultaneous death
and the crushed Toyota we were riding in,
or the giant raindrops that were pelting
onto the windshield and shot through with sun,
that made it seem the two of us were melting
and in a radiant decay becoming one?
Good job with such visions going on
that you were driving and you kept your head,
or that sense of fleshly glory would be gone
with the visionary who sensed it, and you, dead,
as dead as the armadillo, possum or racoon
killed by the nighttime traffic and well
advanced into decay by afternoon
and already giving off a putrid smell.
At least the storm cleaned love-bugs off the car
and washed the windscreen glass so you could drive.
When they copulate in swarms you can’t see far.
They’d sooner fuck their brains out than survive.
They hit the car, embracing, and, squashed flat,
their twinned remains are merged into one mess.
Is it just the crushed canoodling gnat
that needs for its Nirvana nothingness?
Flattened in airborne couples as they fucked
their squashed millions would make the windscreen dark
if the wipers didn’t constantly conduct
the dead to sectors round the dozed-clear arc.
Choked radiators, speckled bumper bars
splattered with love-bugs, two by two,
camouflage the colour of parked cars
pulled up at Chiang’s Mongolian Barbecue.
From then on we were well and truly stuck
and anxious to get back to plant our trees
behind the huge pine-loaded lumber truck,
its red flag flapping in its slipstream breeze.
Because the lashed lopped slash was newly cut
the pungency of pine filled all the air.
We have to drive with all the windows shut,
the smell of pine too powerful to bear.
Now quite impossible to overtake
the convoy crawls up Highway 26.
Your foot keeps hovering above the brake
behind future coffin lids and cocktail sticks.
Our impatience at the slowness of the road
was not repugnance at the smell of pine,
however pungent, but worry for our load
of apple, pear, and fig, and muscadine.
Pine’s the lingering perfume newly-weds
in just-built houses smell off panelling,
off squeaky floorboards, off their platform beds,
that cows smell when their rheumy nostrils sting
and tingle on electric pasture fences,
of the USA’s best-selling bathroom spray
spritzed against those stinks that shock the senses,
shit, decomposition, and decay.
This is the smell in Walden that Thoreau’s
cabin-builder’s hands gave to his lunch,
the resinous pitch that prickled in his nose
whenever he took a sandwich out to munch,
and, maybe, thinking morosely as he chews
how woodlands mostly end up wooden goods,
the wrapping of his butties, week-old news,
was also nature once, and someone’s woods.
In some sub-Walden worlds his dream survives
though these dreams of independence are nightmares
where retiree DIYers save their lives
while everyone around them ’s losing theirs.
Spacemen go one way, these pioneers
mole down into the earth to find a place
to weather out the days, weeks, even yéars
that may well, but for these, kill off our race.
Considering their years it’s maybe kinder
when they burrow in the ground like gophers do
not to offer them the sobering reminder
that rattlesnakes use gopher burrows too.
However layered with rocks and earth the roof,
however stocked with freeze-drieds (praise the Lord!)
however broad the door, how bullet proof,
no matter how much water they have stored,
until the radiation count all-clear
broadcast (they don’t say how) on radio,
when they can, but cautiously, then reappear,
death got there before them, though they grow
by battery-powered Mazda lightbulb beams
alfalfa sprouts, damp blotting pads of cress,
while nations torn apart by common dreams
are united in a state of Nothingness.
Being neither newly-weds nor retirees
today we bought five figs, a pear, a vine,
and still have some belief in planting trees
with lifespans more than three times yours and mine.
Most of my life I’ve wanted to believe
those words of Luther that I’ve half-endorsed
about planting an apple tree the very eve
of the Apocalypse; or the Holocaust.
Every time my bags of red goat leather
are lying labelled England in the hall
and we take our last stroll round the land together
whether it’s winter, summer, spring or fall,
there’s always one last job I find to do,
pruned branches that I need to burn,
one last load of needles left to strew –
it’s a way of guaranteeing my return.
A neighbour learns the skills they call ‘survival’
living wild off sabal palm and game
killed by various means, knife, bow, or rifle,
even by throttling; me, I’ve learned to name
and know the subtle differences between
what once was only ‘woods’, or was before
mere nameless leaves of slightly varied green
but is now, say, persimmon or possumhaw.
Who lives for the future, who for now?
What good’s the cigale’s way or the fourmi’s
if both end up as nothing anyhow
unless they look at life like Socrates
who wished, at the very end, to learn to play
a new air on his novice lyre. Why?
said his teacher, this is your last day.
To know it before I die, was the reply.
II
Chill, sterile, waterless, inert,
but full, the moon illuminates the night
enough for us to dig the still warm dirt
and plant the trees we’ve brought home by its light.
That globe above so different from here,
where no one lives and nothing ever grows,
no soil, no moisture and no atmosphere
to culture kumquats in or grow a rose.
From that great plain of death, inert and chill,
light may rebound but life will never come.
Those so-called seas are sterile, dry and still,
Mare Serenitatis, Sinus Iridum.
And yet, I thought, and yet, where would we be
without these light beams bounced off that dead land,
without these ungrassed dunes and lifeless sea
shedding their pallor on my scooping hand?
Light from a surface so cold and so dead
was the one we planted our new fruit-trees by,
the one that casts its glow now on our bed,
the one I find reflected in your eye.
Is not extinction with its eerie light
the appropriate presider when one swears
to sustain each other through the world of night
we’ve both decided is ‘best born in pairs’?
We see all that we need to by a light
beamed off a barrenness of pits and plain,
off the ’69 Apollo landing site
where planted flag and giant step remain.
That place, some men aspire to, discovers,
with light reflected from plains pocked with pits,