Yikes - you evoke in both a many-sided experience that lingers, Bill.
sort of amusing to call the copperhead Joe and then Joe Blake but also for me a bit mystifying.
Zens as a verb is striking, and I think I get it.
'Awakenings' - yes, I see the double use of the word.
But the last two lines feel to me a bit clunky, and the word backless earlier on feels odd.
Over all, congratulations.
Max
former surprised snake-surpriser
On 23/04/2014, at 7:39 AM, Bill Wootton wrote:
> 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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