the sticky air which pulses
with moths, their powdery wings and velvet
tongues. In the dusk, nighthawks and the fluting
voices from the pond, its edges
webbed with spawn. Everything
leans into the pulpy moon.
In the mornings the hens
make egg after egg, warty-shelled
and perfect; the henhouse floor
packed with old shit and winter straw
trembles with flies, green and silver.
Who wants to leave it, who wants it
to end, water moving
against water, skin
against skin? We wade
through moist sun-
light towards nothing, which is oval
and full. This egg
in my hand is our last meal,
you break it open and the sky
turns orange again and the sun rises
again and this is the last day again.
From INTERLUNAR (1984)
From SNAKE POEMS
Snake Woman
I was once the snake woman,
the only person, it seems, in the whole place
who wasn't terrified of them.
I used to hunt with two sticks
among milkweed and under porches and logs
for this vein of cool green metal
which would run through my fingers like mercury
or turn to a raw bracelet
gripping my wrist:
I could follow them by their odor,
a sick smell, acid and glandular,
part skunk, part inside
of a torn stomach,
the smell of their fear.
Once caught, I'd carry them,
limp and terrorized, into the dining room,
something even men were afraid of.
What fun I had!
Put that thing in my bed and I'll kill you.
Now, I don't know.
Now I'd consider the snake.
Bad Mouth
There are no leaf-eating snakes.
All are fanged and gorge on blood.
Each one is a hunter's hunter,
nothing more than an endless gullet
pulling itself on over the still-alive prey
like a sock gone ravenous, like an evil glove,
like sheer greed, lithe and devious.
Puff adder buried in hot sand
or poisoning the toes of boots,
for whom killing is easy and careless
as war, as digestion,
why should you be spared?
And you, Constrictor constrictor,
sinuous ribbon of true darkness,
one long muscle with eyes and an anus,
looping like thick tar out of the trees
to squeeze the voice from anything edible,
reducing it to scales and belly.
And you, pit viper
with your venomous pallid throat
and teeth like syringes
and your nasty radar
homing in on the deep red shadow
nothing else knows it casts...
Shall I concede these deaths?
Between us there is no fellow feeling,
as witness: a snake cannot scream.
Observe the alien
chainmail skin, straight out
of science fiction, pure
shiver, pure Saturn.
Those who can explain them
can explain anything.
Some say they're a snarled puzzle
only gasoline and a match can untangle.
Even their mating is barely sexual,
a romance between two lengths
of cyanide-colored string.
Despite their live births and squirming nests
it's hard to believe in snakes loving.
Alone among the animals
the snake does not sing.
The reason for them is the same
as the reason for stars, and not human.
Eating Snake
I too have taken the god into my mouth,
chewed it up and tried not to choke on the bones.
Rattlesnake it was, panfried
(Forget the phallic symbolism:
two differences:
snake tastes like chicken,
and who ever credited the prick with wisdom?)
All peoples are driven
to the point of eating their gods
after a time: it's the old greed
for a plateful of outer space, that craving for darkness,
the lust to feel what it does to you
when your teeth meet in divinity, in the flesh,
when you swallow it down
and you can see with its own cold eyes,
look out through murder.
This is a lot of fuss to make about mere lunch:
metaphysics with onions.
The snake was not served with its tail in its mouth
as would have been appropriate.
Instead the cook nailed the skin to the wall,
complete with rattles, and the head was mounted.
It was only a snake after all.
(Nevertheless, the authorities are agreed:
God is round.)
Metempsychosis
Somebody's grandmother glides through the bracken,
in widow's black and graceful
and sharp as ever: see how her eyes glitter!
Who were you when you were a snake?
This one was a dancer who is now
a green streamer waved by its own breeze
and here's your blunt striped uncle, come back
to bask under the wicker chairs
on the porch and watch over you.
Unfurling itself from its cast skin,
the snake proclaims resurrection
to all believers
though some tire soon of being born
over and over; for them there's the breath
that shivers in the yellow grass,
a papery finger, half of a noose, a summons
to the dead river.
Who's that in the cold cellar
with the apples and the rats? Whose is
that voice of a husk rasping in the wind?
Your lost child whispering Mother,
the one more child you never had,
your child who wants back in.
Psalm to Snake
O snake, you are an argument
for poetry:
a shift among dry leaves
when there is no wind,
a thin line moving through
that which is not
time, creating time,
a voice from the dead, oblique
and silent. A movement
from left to right,
a vanishing. Prophet under a stone.
I know you're there
even when I can't see you
I see the trail you make
in the blank sand, in the morning
I see the point
of intersection, the whiplash
across the eye. I see the kill.
O long word, cold-blooded and perfect
Quattrocento
The snake enters your dreams through paintings:
this one, of a formal garden
in which there are always three:
the thin man with the green-white skin
that marks him vegetarian
and the woman with a swayback and hard breasts
that look stuck on
and the snake, vertical and with a head
that's face-colored and haired like a woman's.
Everyone looks unhappy,
even the few zoo animals, stippled with sun,
even the angel who's like a slab
of flaming laundry, hovering
up there with his sword of fire,
unable a
s yet to strike.
There's no love here.
Maybe it's the boredom.
And that's no apple but a heart
torn out of someone
in this myth gone suddenly Aztec.
This is the possibility of death
the snake is offering:
death upon death squeezed together,
a blood snowball.
To devour it is to fall out
of the still unending noon
to a hard ground with a straight horizon
and you are no longer the
idea of a body but a body,
you slide down into your body as into hot mud.
You feel the membranes of disease
close over your head, and history
occurs to you and space enfolds
you in its armies, in its nights, and you
must learn to see in darkness.
Here you can praise the light,
having so little of it:
it's the death you carry in you
red and captured, that makes the world
shine for you
as it never did before.
This is how you learn prayer.
Love is choosing, the snake said.
The kingdom of God is within you
because you ate it.
After Heraclitus
The snake is one name of God,
my teacher said:
All nature is a fire
we burn in and are
renewed, one skin
shed and then another.
To talk with the body
is what the snake does, letter
after letter formed on the grass,
itself a tongue, looping its earthy hieroglyphs,
the sunlight praising it
as it shines there on the doorstep,
a green light blessing your house.
This is the voice
you could pray to for the answers
to your sickness:
leave it a bowl of milk,
watch it drink
You do not pray, but go for the shovel,
old blood on the blade
But pick it up and you would hold
the darkness that you fear
turned flesh and embers,
cool power coiling into your wrists
and it would be in your hands
where it always has been.
This is the nameless one
giving itself a name,
one among many
and your own name as well.
You know this and still kill it.
***
From INTERLUNAR
Bedside
You sit beside the bed
in the extremis ward, holding your father's feet
as you have not done since you were a child.
You would hold his hands, but they are strapped down,
emptied at last of power.
He can see, possibly, the weave of the sheet
that covers him from chest to ankles;
he does not wish to.
He has been opened. He is at the mercy.
You hold his feet,
not moving. You would like
to drag him back. You remember
how you have judged each other
in silence, relentlessly.
You listen intently, as if for a signal,
to the undersea ping of the monitors,
the waterlogged lungs breathed into by machines,
the heart, wired for sound
and running too quickly in the stuck body,
the murderous body, the body
itself stalled in a field of ice
that spreads out endlessly under it,
the snowdrifts tucked by the wind around
the limbs and torso.
Now he is walking
somewhere you cannot follow,
leaving no footprints.
Already in this whiteness
he casts no shadow.
Precognition
Living backwards means only
I must suffer everything twice.
Those picnics were already loss:
with the dragonflies and the clear streams halfway.
What good did it do me to know
how far along you would come with me
and when you would return?
By yourself, to a life you call daily.
You did not consider me a soul
but a landscape, not even one
I recognize as mine, but foreign
and rich in curios:
an egg of blue marble,
a dried pod,
a clay goddess you picked up at a stall
somewhere among the dun and dust-green
hills and the bronze-hot
sun and the odd shadows,
not knowing what would be protection,
or even the need for it then.
I wake in the early dawn and there is the roadway
shattered, and the glass and blood,
from an intersection that has happened
already, though I can't say when.
Simply that it will happen.
What could I tell you now that would keep you
safe or warn you?
What good would it do?
Live and be happy.
I would rather cut myself loose
from time, shave off my hair
and stand at a crossroads
with a wooden bowl, throwing
myself on the dubious mercy
of the present, which is innocent
and forgetful and hits the eye bare
and without words and without even
than do this mourning over.
Keep
I know that you will die
before I do.
Already your skin tastes faintly
of the acid that is eating through you.
None of this, none of this is true,
no more than a leaf is botany,
along this avenue of old maples
the birds fall down through the branches
as the long slow rain of small bodies
falls like snow through the darkening sea,
wet things in turn move up out of the earth,
your body is liquid in my hands, almost
a piece of solid water.
Time is what we're doing,
I'm falling into the flesh,
into the sadness of the body
that cannot give up its habits,
habits of the hands and skin.
I will be one of those old women
with good bones and stringy necks
who will not let go of anything.
You'll be there. You'll keep
your distance,
the same one.
Anchorage
This is the sea then, once
again, warm this time
and swarming. Sores fester
on your feet in the tepid
beach water, where French
wine bottles float among grape-
fruit peels and the stench of death
from the piles of sucked-out shells
and emptied lunches.
Here is a pool with nurse sharks
kept for the tourists
and sea turtles scummy with algae,
winging their way through their closed
heaven of dirty stones. Here
is where the good ship Envious
rides at anchor.
The land is red with hibiscus
and smells of piss; and here
beside the houses built on stilts,
warped in the salt and heat,
they plant their fathers in the yards,
cover them with cement
tender as blankets:
Drowned at sea, the same one
the mermaids swim in, hairy
and pallid, with rum on the beach after.
But that's a day trip.
Further along, there are tents
where the fishers camp,
cooking their stews of claws
and spines, and at dawn they steer
further out than you'd think
possible, between the killer
water and the killer sun,
carried on hollow pieces
of wood with the names of women,
not sweethearts
only but mothers, clumsy
and matronly, though their ribbed bodies
are fragile as real bodies