Snaky snaps: two for one
Afternoon Joe
I was helping my neighbour
unload concrete blocks
from the back of his
truck in autumn.
Ahhh, cried Colin, arms up
as if arrested, backing
away, eyes alert.
Prima donna,
I dismissed, expecting a spider
but no, a copperhead -
lithe body arching,
tongue flicking.
The snake further uncoiled
from one half of a hollow
cast block, prancing
on the tailgate.
How could so much snake,
easily three or four feet,
scrunch into such
a tiny space?
And whey ho, half an hour ago,
I must have picked up Joe
and passed him in his
concrete haven
to Colin in confined carspace
where he had stacked him.
At any point Joe might
have awakened.
The present zens into crystal
focus as benign territory
transforms into a zone
of bobbing menace.
The rippling snake dips his head
to a tyre, pauses, folds back
then eases himself
to ground,
flattens out on stony clay
sashays, slithers, dis-
appears between
two low rocks.
Thing was it seemed we who
were the intruders more
than Joe Blake roused
from somnolence.
bw
22.4.14
Awakenings
A snake awoke from inside a hollow concrete block
I had minutes before passed to my neighbour squatting
in the back of his covered ute. The snake, a copperhead
emerged at the unstacking stage. He was pissed off.
Arching into wakefulness, he tried a few movements
available only to the backless before slipping from
tailgate to stony ground and making his slithery way
to a couple of rocks between which he disappeared.
His dark-skinned singularity, his sinuous searching
stood in contrast to the regularity of our stacking task.
Habit runs up our arms, sets our posture, gets hum
going in our heads. A snake unsettles all that tripe.
We wait to waken long after rising each morning.
When the doing disappears, aliveness is available.
bw
23.4.14
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