Snake

I.

A snake in the grass,

she said, How apt, I thought—its hissing head

then again severed, all picture-windowed,

again, these years later: torqued & blade-flung from

that summer’s mown whirr; crassly

horked & blood gartered—briefly, ungainly—along the glared panes

of spent youth’s two-stroke take on what

conjured nostalgia might conclude was at stake, might

recommend to give up, by way of suggestion.

A field work, this sort of scaled laundry

list. On how memory moults, sheds its skin; on how narrative

arcs plan revolts—overthrow their own terms

of reference & begin to eat their own tails. (The gist?

These circuitous breakroom asides have us, now, all attention; we’re rapt,

well-charmed & regaled.)

ii.

There are times

recollection’s a resurrection of nothing

but harms: a small forked-tongued thing, a split skull

forlornly suspended by slick ligatures of its own

sudden lace leaking across the once-pristine face of the house

you think you grew up in. Times

it’s a guillotined snake. An uneasy whole—a crude bifurcation;

decorum’s last-minute, unplanned vacation—but

no longer a something we’re mssing: a few feet away, the rest of it

lies, lawn-essed in place, unspooling & torn.

Florid exegesis gone meta-. For though hemic

& strewn, this butcher’s best guess is a now-cooling violence: A mistake. In

the past. A thing best left

as is. Just

a snake, in the grass.