It also took me back to Lawrences snake poem (it was lawrence my memory
battery is running out !!
-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick McManus [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 23 April 2014 09:15
To: 'Poetryetc: poetry and poetics'
Subject: RE: Snaky snaps: two for one
Hi Bill enjoyed that -in first poem was not sure where snake was hidden
-second explained -we are short on snakes but do run to a friendly slow worm
cheers P
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Bill Wootton
Sent: 22 April 2014 22:40
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Snaky snaps: two for one
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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