Reign of Snakes by Robert Wrigley

Author:Robert Wrigley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Reign of Snakes

1. Revival

During the heat of summer days, they sprawl

in the shade of sumac glades

or hunt the bottom-watered thickets—buck brush

and blackberry—dining on mice.

And beneath every yellow pine for miles,

the scaly, pulse-quickening sticks

from each tree’s unlimbing.

At dawn and dusk you can find the snakes

on rock face shelves, basking,

sun still funneling up from basalt.

There are side canyon gullies, drywashes

and scumbled slides, half stone,

half soil, and shed skins blow in them

like a snow of translucent leaves,

while deep inside the winter chambers, a boil

of approximate sleep, lidless eyes

unseeing, a fist of snakes as big as a man.

I stopped one night, road-drunk,

at the torch-lit revival tent

of a trinity of back woods preachers,

in Arkansas or the boot heel of Missouri,

where a graying, hortatory praisemaster sang hymns

of joy, and his stern wife damned us all

to fire. I rose to leave, filled with free ice tea,

a fistful of tracts in my hand,

then stopped, as the pale, thin son

held the snake above his head and began to dance,

the rattler grasped mid-length

in his left hand, the right

stroking the jeweled scales, a caress,

as he brought the head to his lips,

his eyes sublimely closed.

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