One Poem, One Essay

Thaw

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When he fetched the morning paper, he read of the would-be bomber wrestled

down by fellow travelers.  A mile in the air, but nothing exploded,

the man merely scorched his own shins.  Here icicles fall and bleed on the ground,

his metal roof pings, day yawns.  He yawns at a crossword:  22 Down, 

Ram’s Ma’am.  Tired clue for ewe, it baffled him once, which seems hard to imagine.

He feels as though the years since then, as soon as they get here, vanish. 

An expert now, he needs no pencil, taps his pen on the puzzle,

gray grainy grid on the page.  Below the fold, Hollywood  Buzzes  --

with something or other.  He doesn’t buzz. If he used to have a life

beyond a hobby, a dog on his lap, is this one so vapid he craves

explosion?  No, and he knows it.  But as trees go grainy and gray as well

with something vague, neither rain nor snow, they iterate the world’s

flatness of feature.  19 Down:  ovum-to-be.   His children

are gone, his wife in the earth, who even in older age could be ardent.

And all around him a rampancy of things lukewarm and wizened.

Maybe terror is you, he puns, the you that’s not ram’s ma’am –  nor is he

ram anymore.  He sluggishly seeks a synonym for chat

in seven letters, 16 Across.  How he needs his wife to be back,

needing an ear for his desolate whispers, whimpers. 

                                                                                    The dear deaf dachsund

breathes on him from cheek to chin.  It quickens him for a moment,

that heady, delusive mixture: animal heat and animal moisture.

The Serpent on Barnet Knoll 

The young retriever noses a frozen snake across the rain-glazed snow. The creature should long since have wriggled deep into mulch in some granite fissure, so that when it died, it would do so down there, in secret. That it didn’t seems odd. 

But my mind’s still odder, having followed its own inward paths from that coiled corpse to a moment this morning before I set out: at the mirror, greasing lips against the cold, I inspected myself. The age-lines, the puckering mouth, the thin gray hair– all still shocked me. I also studied a wen, the permanent swelling that puffs my left eyebrow into a small horn.  It’s the frozen snake that has reminded me of that passing moment, though how it did so I can’t explain.

Out here, I encounter the morning’s savage gusts. The spruce-tops thrash and complain. When there’s a lull, I hear the ceaseless and meaningless scolding of red squirrels, the grating of ravens.

One day, in my third grade year to be precise, I knocked off Joe Morey’s hat on the playground, taunting him for a sissy, even though he and I were friends for the most part. Nearly weeping with frustration, he reached down for the hat at the same time I did. Our heads clapped together, my brow swelling slightly but, as it turned out, forever. I’d meant to be cruel that day, I was, and I got my long-lasting due.

In life, the snake was a mere, harmless garter. Today it’s something else, and makes me quit my hike for a while. I stand and wait, but nothing comes to change me. Why would I dream it would, no matter my unvoiced, uncertainly directed, all but unconscious pleading?

It’s almost Christmas, a holy time for many. Through decades of northern winters, I’ve never seen a snake at large in December. But however I strive to discover something significant in the event, nothing reveals itself except what I’ve long known about snakes –mere facts, devoid of meaning, versions of reality that seem only somehow to discredit me. 

Was this the creature’s first cold season? Who knows? A snake doesn’t count or reason. But I do; I know there are just so many moments in anybody’s life. Why do I stand here statue-still and fritter a single one away? And yet what else should I be thinking about?

I have wife, children, grandchildren, along with a host of lesser earthly attachments. I clench them tight to my heart, but there come times when a sort of unattached self prevails. Left at large too, I know, that other self might contemplate violence or crime. Also, of course, it doesn’t. I daily, dutifully, and gladly return to a bourgeois life. Am I not therefore absolved?  But what in me requires absolution anyhow? I simply feel this unsettledness, ungovernable, random, opaque.

One day my head struck someone else’s, but even before that, surely, something had slithered into my soul. It would linger lifelong, making subsequent, unwelcome forays up to the cool surface, whenever, however it might.