During the heat of summer days, they sprawl
in the shade of sumac glades
or hunt the bottom-watered thickets—buck brush
and blackberry—dining on mice.
And beneath every yellow pine for miles,
the scaly, pulse-quickening sticks
from each tree’s unlimbing.
At dawn and dusk you can find the snakes
on rock face shelves, basking,
sun still funneling up from basalt.
There are side canyon gullies, drywashes
and scumbled slides, half stone,
half soil, and shed skins blow in them
like a snow of translucent leaves,
while deep inside the winter chambers, a boil
of approximate sleep, lidless eyes
unseeing, a fist of snakes as big as a man.
I stopped one night, road-drunk,
at the torch-lit revival tent
of a trinity of back woods preachers,
in Arkansas or the boot heel of Missouri,
where a graying, hortatory praisemaster sang hymns
of joy, and his stern wife damned us all
to fire. I rose to leave, filled with free ice tea,
a fistful of tracts in my hand,
then stopped, as the pale, thin son
held the snake above his head and began to dance,
the rattler grasped mid-length
in his left hand, the right
stroking the jeweled scales, a caress,
as he brought the head to his lips,
his eyes sublimely closed.
As a boy I flogged a cornsnake to death
with the limber end of a leaf rake.
It took a while, but I let my friends help,
and once, leaping crossways
onto the backyard hammock,
my head hung over the edge,
I saw the copperhead upside down
at the end of the ground’s rush by.
Massive and beautiful, tucked among
hummocks of crabgrass
at the edge of a scar of clay,
it stayed there, tasting the air above,
then oozed away, machine of muscle,
machine of oil and bone.
And I have hacked rattlesnakes to bloody hunks,
grunting my rage, and made with a single surgical blow
a guillotine of the shovel’s edge.
I have skinned them out
and exhumed the damp ruffled carcass of a mouse.
And once, I followed the aim
of my grandfather’s cane to see one,
a blacksnake high on the scaly bark
of a cemetery silver maple,
a sign, he told me, of evil buried near.
My grandfather knew every corpse around us alive,
but wouldn’t say which it might have been,
only tapped his pipe empty
against the shining, ostentatious obelisk
of the man who owned the mine he’d worked in,
then plucked a carnation for his lapel.
Why snakes? Always snakes?
Why that long narrow room, nearly dark,
‘Snake’s Uptown Pool Hall and Tattoo Parlor,’
its phosphorescent fixtures shedding
a skin of light, half a dozen rectangular lily pads
fading down a swamp. Why Snake himself?
Buddha-fat, he sat behind the counter
dispensing chalk and balls,
and when summer’s dank heat came down
he glowered in the exhalations of his oscillating fan,
naked to the waist—chest, back, and arms
a cathedral expanse of tattoos: twenty or more
curvaceous women wearing nothing
but strategically placed snakes.
My eyes adjusted to the dark,
but to little else. Already my friends
were gone, whooping their bikes down the back streets
and laughing. Blue portals in the half light,
my pupils must have loomed above my lips,
and the hiss I could not stop making, the long slithering
ess that was to have been my ruse and request—
a Slim Jim, a soda—now sputtered out
into a nest of breasts of scales, an evil I entered
saying less than a word. Snake looked down.
‘You like my serpents, boy?’ he asked,
and it would have been as though he’d said it
to the light, the door’s wash flashbulb fast,
a hot crack of balls giving chase,
the fat man’s dry hack of laughter behind me.
‘You want to taste what’s good, you got to lick
what’s evil,’ he tells me. Call it theology,
catechism, Giuseppe ‘Big Joe’ Truccano’s
weekly hour of prayer for poontang
and heavy tips. His tie’s unbowed,
a monogrammed handkerchief
covers his ruffled shirt and cummerbund.
He’s the handsomest man in the world,
tends bar in the city at Anthony’s slick club,
and claims the men’s room attendant there
unzips his fly for him and fishes out his cock
with a spoon. I’m enthralled. We’re at Toon’s Bar & Grill,
it’s nine a.m., and all the Sunday air’s
a battle of dueling church bells.
I’ve skipped the service to be here,
for the communion of boot black coffee,
the host of a day-old doughnut, glazed.
Big Joe’s got an illegal Bloody Mary, envy
of the half dozen jittery alcoholics around us.
He’s got a platter of hash browns and pan gravy,
two over easy eggs and two strips of bacon
arranged on top like an edible crossbones and skull.
‘Mama believed I’d be a priest,’ he says, ‘and I swear
to you, Junior, I believe I am.
I go down,’ he tells me, ‘every week I go down
on my knees and do the penance
the sin-shifter says I should’—
then the switchblade, sprung out
to hash his eggs and bacon in the spuds.
It’s spring, the earth’s salacious remains are rising.
Under the spell of his eyes the lewdest robins
are treacle, the long disquisitions
on feminine anatomy more beautiful than roses.
Outside, the last quiet moments
on the street, before the churches empty.
I have a minute, maybe two, to make it back
but I don’t move. ‘Go on,’ he says,
and as I rise to leave he pulls the handkerchief
from his collar and drags out the medal
of St Christopher too, size of a quarter
on a silver chain he quickly stuffs back in.
It’ll be all they have for a partial ID
months later, the pewter melted
under a blowtorch blast, the Saint’s elongated
robes oozing down to the sternum, the Child unscathed
atop the flow, and Big Joe—armless, legless,
battered, even the genitals gone—
unfound for weeks in the tall grass
of some abandoned orchard, beneath a barren tree.
The men who made the railroad bed,
hauling off the overlay of rock and soil,
who laid the ties and rails, those men
suffered their wages and more,
now and then the great diesel shovel
unloading with a two ton bite
a hundred pounds of rattlesnakes
from a den, thudding on the dump truck
roofs and hoods like a scattering of severed arms.
They dangled from the rearview mirrors
and dropped along the road out of the canyon,
up Hank’s Grade to the deep ravine
Lute Johnson dreamed he’d fill.
What a circus of slithers his garden became,
by the end of week one Lute
alone on his back porch just after dusk,
all the near distance before him
a locust whine of rattles, the contract good
for another nine hundred loads.
And before them all, the scouts and surveyors,
drillers and blasters, driving stakes
and locating benchmarks. They scoured
the untouched riverside, knowing
it would never be the same.
One blistering August afternoon a surveyor knelt
in the shade of a cottonwood grove
and sipped from a smooth basin
the clear spill from Pine Creek, so cold
it numbed his teeth and made his temples pound.
An hour’s nap in long grass
left him plagued with a pox of ticks
he rolled to get away from. Imagine him
kneeling there, the burble of Pine Creek
a delicate counterpoint to his whimpers,
then Pine Creek alone when he saw them,
an audience of rattlers coiled
each in a hand-sized bowl of moss and rock,
looking and licking his way.
Or consider slick Albert Charbonneau, one-time powder monkey
from the Silver Valley mines, throwing the switch
and hearing the deep thunk, feeling the ground pitch
then seeing all around him, part and whole,
a bloody rain of snakes.
The word for her, I know now, was florid,
flushed and loudly fashionable Mrs Evy Weeks.
For years I believed conversation
embarrassed her, a sunrise reliable blush
boiling her rouge to the skin edge of blood.
Midday in summer, come to her door
for the one-dollar wage her dandelioned lawn
had earned me, I watched her pinch
from her deep, floral coin purse
the usual four quarters, her cat’s-eye glasses
giving me back my waiting self,
her pedal pushers in gold lame
or the skin-taut, furless spots of leopards.
Her flesh seethed crimson,
as though the dark cool air rushing out
from behind her blew from a bellows,
the cracked dusty porch a forge.
She called me ‘Bobby’, the hated diminutive,
and bent toward me with the silver
just far enough the brink of her breasts
showed at the scooped neckline
and reddened in my gaze like miraculous tomatoes.
She was beautiful, I think, and drunk.
Every day at dusk her husband emerged
and eased his gargantuan Buick
from the backyard garage and waited
at the curb for her, then headed,
my mother told me, for the track.
Each week their trash can filled
with a glockenspiel of bottles.
By the time I was thirteen
our paths diverged—mine halting
but ascendant, hers certain decline.
Though there was that day, shamed
by my mother’s nag, I’d put off her yard
long enough, and began a surly, mean-spirited mowing,
dicing paper cups and cardboard beer coasters
heedlessly, taking out the sad, swallowed pansies
with the weeds. The copperhead
was huge, thick as a man’s forearm
and sprawled in the shade below a window.
I panicked. No other word for it. I screamed
like a baby and froze against the chalky clapboards
crying momma. Spiked heels gone,
her bare feet came palely into view
lean and muscled as a tree-climbing girl’s.
Her left hand, bedecked in baubles,
dazzled the snake’s eyes away
just as her right reached down,
took the tail, and in a single, brute
whiplash stroke sent a wave
through flesh and scales
that blew the fanged head off
with a gunshot report. Then she was kneeling
before me, stroking my arms
and asking me was I bit, was I bit,
and hold me to her, I see now,
just as though we were dancing:
her head on my shoulder,
and behind her the headless snake,
a helix of death throe coils
coming to rest in the just-cut, musky greens,
and her ear, in a fog of perfume,
only inches from my eyes, and red as a rose.
Long interlocked ribly abundance scale
scatter racketeer of bead isinglass skin slough
slick back tuck of fang and spit
pit black waggle tongue strummer
air boil hiss and spin all din and kingly silence
Lord and belly-slither symbol O snake.
Rake ravaged hoed up buried in air
and blasphemed blackberry transits cartilaginous
coil and sleepless swallower of mouse
you peristaltic simpleton pure and perfect
pig feed demon O snake O angel.
Cottonmouth dirt phallus prey
of hawk and owl first mind fuck
and venerable venomous original kin
sin slinging charmed tumescent skin bone
speed of blood needy foil and oil
slick agent of doom snake man mask of God.
But O you nefarious marionettes, limbless,
slithering brethren, and mouthpiece
Howdy Doodies of Hell—consider
the greater burden of
omniscience, that cold-blooded certainty
of absolute foreknowledge, the way
the Lord saith, knowing full well all
He will have said, knew full well
all He will have known. When the poet wrote
he’d sooner kill a man than a hawk,
I was not yet born, though I was well along
into my fifth decade when I saw
for the first time a hawk fly
over with a snake wriggling
in its talons. So plentiful the snakes here,
so plentiful the hawks, I hardly looked up
anymore, when a shadow caught my eye,
but did the day the hawk let go,
the snake in sudden spinning free fall,
my two youngest children at play in the yard.
Can you understand, Brother Snake, my swiftness,
all the old center fielder’s instincts returned
as I leaped up and snatched the spade
from its spot beside the pumphouse and ran,
the shovel on its down-swing falling
only seconds after the serpent hit the ground,
not a dozen feet from where they played.
Some days, in high summer,
when just enough shade develops midday,
I can almost imagine the river below my house
the Euphrates, not the Clearwater,
and upstream, at the headwaters,
where the Selway spills from the wilderness,
a paradise, for all our doomed longing,
we’ve made a kind of park from,
where no one lives but the beasts
of field and forest, and all along
the sun-warmed canyons, your kind—
there, where I promise always
to leave you in peace.
The vast basaltic flows cooled to columns
or twisted half-set to a litter
of flagstones and cartoon wheels,
the earth today honeycombed
with caves and gaps, subterranean chambers
immune to seasons. All the better
for field mice and shrews, packrats
and meadow voles, rockchucks, ground
squirrels, and moles, a vast scampering
cornucopia for the snakes. In spring
a green wash overwhelms the world,
and sprawled among the daffodils
a gartersnake tinged, chameleon in the leaves;
or as late as Thanksgiving, lacking the first
true frost, the dry grass crackle and clatter
of falling seed may still unnerve,
the last bumbling grasshoppers loosing
a racket to make the blood go cold.
But never in winter. Snowed over, the canyon’s
at last traversable, the only perils
sheer depth or snow-hidden trip wires—
fallen fences, a blackberry’s creeping vines.
So this is fabulous, a sweet trick of fate:
a frigid day in February and a full-grown rattlesnake
curled to a comma in the middle of the just plowed road.
Ice ghost, I think, curve of rock
or stubbed-off branch. But the diamonds
are there, under a dust of crystals looming,
impossible, summer’s tattoo, the mythical argyle of evil.
With the toe of my boot I nudge it.
Snow in the pasture is two feet deep,
a thermometer on the shed reads minus eight.
Mean leather, demon sap, I cannot
believe my eyes, my hands, and swing
the thing before me—snake saber,
venomous sickle, reptilian boomerang of ice.
There’s nobody home but the dog
and me. She nips at the tail
and dances. If I threw this curved serpent
across the yard, she’d fetch it,
but instead I stuff it in a heavy burlap sack,
cinch the end tight with twine,
take it in the house and arrange it on the hearth.
Here’s a cup of rosehip tea, a vodka snowshoe,
a cigar. Here are my wet gloves
dangling from their nails, holding nothing but air
in the shape of a thing—shaft, handle,
cylinder, smoke. Now the dog’s asleep
in a parallelogram of sun, and one by one
a cold scent lures the cats from their lairs,
ears half-cocked. They sniff, they pat.
One hooks a claw in the woof or the warp
and pulls just enough to topple the sack
from hearth to carpet nap and jumps back
at the dim clack-clack inside.
Low in her throat, the dog rumbles—creak
of stone, light fall.
Call it Sunday, a day of rest.
I blow a huge, undulant ring of smoke
and wait.