Serpentarium
Poisonous or not a snake pops when crushed
by a car,
the neighbor’s car, an SUV hybrid that
scaled down still has
what it takes. What a
rednecky thing to do I say. The right
thing
he says, matter of fact, not taking
offense. Rednecky,
to make it sound as if he wasn’t, quite,
and right,
not Bill of Rights, e.g., 2nd
Amendment, but as opposed
to wrong, as in dumb wrong. If he’d walked up to the house,
got one of his guns, the one pre-loaded
with snake shot,
I supposed, and blown the snake back to
paradise, or beyond,
that’s what I’d call redneck. Either way I was enchanted.
The snake’s narrative, like the talking
frog’s in fact a prince,
or the gun’s, or the gun dog’s, had found
the ideal reader.
We went hunting once, and once was enough. Not
the noise
or blood so much, but the evisceration. His dog’s nose for quail
quivered like a wind
sock trying on a breeze. That poor old
dog—
now blind and deaf and stiff and barely able to reach
the end of the drive, cross the road, squat
and do its business
in my field. I’d watch, and relieved myself to see the
deed done
despite long odds, applaud. Good
dog. I’d just waved
to the neighbor, car to car, and noticed
him noticing a stick
shaped like a snake lying there in ambush
at the blind dog
cross walk, but sticks don’t reflect and on
reflecting I stopped,
backed up, got out, and prepared to bear witness.
Watching the tire
sneak up on the snake anyone would wonder what kind of a mess
was about to happen, what kind of noise?
What part of the brain
knows deflating a snake couldn’t be quiet? The bubble wrap part?
The snake was not
unaware and tried to snake away. The
inside of
its S slid into the outside. A
bright day and the copper,
no misnomer, shined. By instinct I’d have veered out of fate’s way
and by temperament then thought about it
all day and the next.
The neighborly
thing might be to keep the neighborhood safe.
A snake in the field out can end up baled,
waiting to bite the hand
that stacks it. Turns out the treatment for snake bite is, on
average,
worse than the bite. First
Aid? Remember those kits with razor
blades for cutting shallow X’s downstream of the fang marks
and little rubber cups for sucking venom
out if you didn’t have
the stomach to suck it out yourself, even
though sucking works
better? Forget the
kits. Stay calm. Drive to the ER.
They will sit you down and wait… of course
that applies
to most anything in a busy ER. If the arm or leg starts to swell
or darken or blister they’ll give you
anti-venom made in horses.
Not as easy
as it sounds. Allergy is common, and
there’s more to
that than sneezing, more like your bones cough. There you are
snake bit in an appendage and the cure begins to kill you,
but slowly, like the rack coaxing truth out
of every joint,
all your secrets and more, noisy too, but
who has time to listen?
My wife’s boss
killed a snake for the lady next door.
It was coiled on her front step, waiting
for her, letting her know:
one
false move. Makes
you want to sharpen the machete.
At a new clot buster research pow-wow in
Arizona,
they gave us an afternoon off to see the
desert. We drove around
looking at cacti
and walked around looking at cacti, some of which
are larger than border guards, and for the
finale the guide took out a
bag of rattlers, a bag like a pillow case, but squirmy.
One at a time they slithered and coiled and
rattled for us until
he got bit in the wrist by one of the
smaller, quicker, meaner ones.
Shit he said. Shit we agreed. We looked at each other
and tried hard not to remember those kits
and where to cut
and how hard to suck and what if the sucker
swallows
in the heat of the moment? He put the snake back in the bag.
Down where it’d be hard not to gather
around and hear its side
of the story. Bad
snake you’d want to scold. Stay calm
he advised us. We dropped him at an ER where he knew
they do a nice job with snake bite. The
amazing thing
about the dessert outside Phoenix are the
subdivisions with lawns
and sprinkler systems. Why move to Arizona if you still have
to cut the grass? My neighbor and I shared
a riding mower
for years until it died, and then we shared
a kid down the street
who started a lawn business and worked hard
enough you knew
someday he’ll be president of something. When he went off
to a good college his sister took over and
when she left home
the next oldest was a little too young to
drive a mower
so the mother offered to fill in for the
summer.
My neighbor said sure, why not, you couldn’t beat the price,
but I was not ready to let the future
President’s mother
cut my grass. I might add, although not snaky and maybe
snarky
but still on the subject of primal fears
and urges,
that our lawn boy liked to kill deer with a
bow and arrow.
A Presidential sport for sure. He borrowed one of my trees
for the ambush. You climb up before dawn, stay calm,
and wait for a good shot. Then his mom rode
the mower over
and dropped off some sausage, my share of
the proceeds.
You have to be polite when people offer to
share what they killed
by guile and their own hands, and butchered
too.
Everyone remembers the first time they ate
snake.
My father’s rule was no cooked vegetables, so when the neighbors
back then had us over and
the dad there passed around a platter
of slimy cylinders the size of fingers snake made as much sense
as okra, which I’d never seen or heard of
and hadn’t seen since
until the other day when it showed up
pickled and hors d’oeuvred
when we had some next door. We take turns hosting
the sunset.
I’ve been looking on eBay
for one of those little brass cannons
to let my neighbor know come on over the sun is over the yardarm.
I’d like to send over a blimp that blinks a neon invitation,
and will, once the price of drones comes
down.
His porch has the mountains. Mine has the moon.
I used to moonlight in the ER, and the
first time my wife asked
you sure you know what you’re doing? I’ve
seen everything
at
least once my smart answer…except snake bite,
and sure enough the other hospital in town
sent us over one.
We get all the uninsured stuff. Boring to watch an arm not swell.
People assume they ought to kill the snake
and bring you the head,
for ID, which means a head in a jar in the conference
room
where doctors sit around and talk about who
has what and where.
Welcome to the clutter. Donut crumbs. Coffee dregs. Pizza crusts.
Fortune cookies that might remind you, in case you’d ever forget,
the earth is but the frozen echo of the
voice of Yahweh.
Whew, my all time favorite and one reason
to eat Chinese
in Cambridge Massachusetts. I’m the neatnik who ward attends
for a few weeks and first thing needs to
straighten up. Lesson 1:
clean
up your mess.
I know firsthand that snake heads float,
at least the eastern diamondback, in lazy
circles. Who could resist
giving one a swirl? Experts advise not to kill the snake
that bites you. I agree, unless you can
stay calm while searching
and destroying.
Looking at a snake in a jar always reminds me
of Boyle’s Law. He put a viper in the jar, sucked out all the
air
however they did that in the 17th
century, and proved
the volume of a gas expands as pressure
drops.
The volume of a snake, like the volume of a
balloon, expands
only up to a point. Who knew there were vipers still in England?
Who knew they had vacuum pumps? When we were kids
in Miami we went to the Serpentarium near our favorite bar b-q
place way south on Dixie Highway. Once
was enough.
A King Kong size statue of a cobra invited
you to stop,
against our mother’s better judgment, to
give her credit.
At 10 AM and 2 PM you could watch a
qualified herpetologist
[this was before herpes] extract venom from King Cobras
who standing up straight are almost as tall
as border guards
and if grabbed by the neck and choked will drip
venom,
teaspoon size drips from fangs that could
puncture tires,
into glass beakers that looked scientific. Venom isn’t gooey,
more spit than sap, and one of its constituent
toxins dissolves clots,
but not as good as the leech. This guy had forearms like Popeye,
he was
quick, and he almost made it look easy.
He almost had a perfect record. While
waiting around hoping
and not hoping to see him get bit, the
tourists would watch
what happens at lunch when day old chicks
were dropped
in the pit viper pit. My sister still has
nightmares.
Our mother claimed the chicks were
terminal, fate sealed
regardless, but who or what isn’t and we weren’t born
yesterday.
The euthanasia argument seemed too slippery
a slope.
Speaking of slippery the place closed after
the tourist
and the crocodile incident. Miami needs
tourists, and a good show
would be one of those pythons taking over
the Everglades
versus a full grown Florida gator. Albino pythons,
so you’d wonder how they flourish in the
Sunshine State.
One day my father brought home a baby
alligator,
a red ribbon with a bow around its neck.
Cute?
You could buy them at Woolworth’s, baby turtles too,
that was before salmonella. This was a gift from a patient,
a Seminole, before casinos and untaxed
cigarettes but not before
the roadside shows featuring full blooded Seminoles
wrestling
giant alligators. We never stopped for one
of those so I don’t know i
f stroking the alligator’s belly really does put it
to sleep.
I hope so.
One theory for the reduced road kill on South Florida
highways is
pythons getting to the possums and armadillos
before the cars. No proof and it may all be
climate change,
like everything else. Everyone remembers the first time they ate
armadillo. I could go on and on, like
that snake that swallows
its tail. Or the kind that flies off cliffs and makes a
living
in the canopy. They leap into the void, flatten out, except
their hearts, invoke Bernoulli’s Law, gain
lift, postpone gravity,
and don’t look down. Whether you call it flying, gliding,
parachuting or kiting, they get from point A to B
farther than flying squirrels could.
Venomous too, but weak venom
and small fangs. Either way the trip begins with a leap of
faith.
On a similar subject the staff of Asclepius
is entwined by a snake
that reminds us to shed our skin and renew on an annual
basis.
In other words invest in an annuity soon as
you join the work force
otherwise lose out on the miracle of
interest compounded daily.
At the clinic where I work patients rush in
to share their bites
and rashes. Life is dangerous and itchy
they want me to believe,
and I do, otherwise who need deliverance?
Not just deer ticks
but deer attacks, not only rabid foxes but
rabid bears, not only bats
in the attic but their guano. Poison Ivy is the state plant. One lady
inhaled some at a cook-out. Her
chest x ray proved lungs weep.
One lady blames whiplash on her husband who
swerved hard
to avoid something he claims was a snake
trying to cross the road.
She’s
skeptical. Why she asks, would the snake
cross the road?
A rhetorical question because she’s sure it
was only a stick.
She’ll be OK with some PT. He smiles and doesn’t take it
personal. The art of medicine, according to
Voltaire, is to entertain
the patient
while nature cures the patient. Time
cures,
but only some of the time. If possible, give chance a chance.
Sooner or later extremes regress to the mean.
It’s not that the gods
are whimsical.
Nor the planets or their moons.
The Greeks
let snakes wander through wards which also
served as temples.
Friendly snakes. This was way before Hallmark or e-cards.
Get
well soon the snakes might say, speaking not only
Greek
but in tongues that also taste the air.
Those who speak in tongues
and handle snakes and play electric guitars
at revival meetings are
casting out the devil.
Good luck. Allowing just a little
for poetic license, these are the same
people who brought us
rock and roll. If your song argues chorus
after chorus ain’t no
grave gonna hold my
body down the rhetoric is
strengthened
by the snake you dance with. Faith comes in many packages.
Condoms too. And the risk that comes with pleasure.
Back road gas stations, and not just the
back road we take
through peanut country to the beach, have
condom machines
in the men’s rooms. You can consider which
flavor while drying
your hands.
What does this have to do with snakes?
Once a year I go fishing with a bunch of
guys, full spectrum
rednecks almost without exception, to Cape Fear
on the Outer Banks. We stand next to the ocean all day,
listen to it all night. We catch the tide and gather the moon
and trust the dunes and think long and hard
about how
to fool the fish. Casting your bait to the wind is one way
of trusting fortune. The fish are lucky
it’s only me
at the other end of the line because after
a few wayward casts
I wander off looking for glass. I have a
theory of beach glass
based on tide, picnic traffic, and the
rum-sugar-slave trade
that helped make this nation what it is
today. My kids think
my taste in glass is something else I need
to work on. If it’s glass
and on the beach and wouldn’t cut your finger, it’s a
keeper.
Not that I don’t take pleasure if it’s foggy
blue or something early
in the rainbow. At the top of the jar, pride of place,
a digit size
shard that starts red, goes orange, then
yellow in the tip.
Surely from another planet with wind and
tide, beer and soda
stored in bottles. A
fish bowl would be ideal to showcase
our collection. Fish don’t think the way we do,
but they must wonder when shrimp appear out
of nowhere,
attached to rigs called Sputniks,
a misnomer because what the rig
resembles is a lunar landing module. I used to spear fish.
You do things in high school that aren’t
Presidential and later on
you wonder how and why. The eel heads and necks poking out
from under
the reefs look like the oldest men in rest homes
where they are outnumbered 10:1 by even
older women.
Wrinkled eyes, jaws working on something
other than a sentence.
A diving magazine had a story about eel
attacks, morays eels,
and first aid for eel bites. Step 1:
stay calm. Step 2:
pry open
the
jaws. I’d
add with a tool not a finger. Step 0 would be
don’t
put your hand in the hole in the first place. Fact or factoid:
a sea snake bite kills you faster than any
other snake bite?
Not what most people wake up worrying
about.
Most people wake up worrying about the
health of their annuity
or the mole that may be changing, the one
in the eye,
way back where no one can see except the
optometrist
who can only see it using mirrors. He wants
me to come back
every year for another retinal
map, which brings to mind
those ancient maps when the world was flat
and included sea
serpents waiting for whoever was brave or
lost enough to sail over
the horizon.
There’s always more than one mole,
but one in particular. The eye tech says look straight at the camera.
The eye almost needs to touch the lens
that’s looking in. The tech
thinks I am not trying or not paying
attention, but for anyone
with sunken eyeballs it’s embarrassing how
the eye,
mind of its own, backs up out of fear or
blinks at the last second.
Talk about sunken, imagine Kafka trying to
cooperate.
There are eyeball parasites in Africa that
swim in the aqueous
humor at the front of the eye between the iris and the
cornea.
They don’t look like sea horses, but they
should.
More like paisley, but that’s true for most
parasites. In our country
we just have bubbles floating by, mostly
harmless bubbles.
There are parasites in South America that
swim up the urethra,
right up the appendage to the bladder, and once there are
not able
to back out due to the orientation of their spines.
Speaking of nature’s cruelty, can a snake
bite you while it swims?
Can they swim under water and surprise you from
below? No. No.
Not in a just world. Except for sea snakes
and that’s another hemisphere. Sometimes snakes have corners.
They can assume the shape of a bird house,
bluebird houses
that come in kits that make nice gifts, at
least people keep giving
them to us as house gifts. No pun. One wall is hinged and opens
up so you
can show the kids the nest with blue eggs the size
of white grapes. Sky blue, a deep sky. A hopeful sight.
That’s when the neighbor called, this was
before cell phones,
and asked me what to do, as if one day at
med school
there was a lecture on extraction. His house, from a kit,
was attached to a galvanized pipe that
didn’t rust or stop the snake
but did pull out of the ground. Holding the house high,
like something you’d see in the revival church
leading the preacher
towards the altar, I carried the snake house across the
road
and over to my field, shook it out, a rat
snake, let it unkink
and de-cube and disappear in tall grass a
month shy of being hay.
Field mice don’t
keep score or expect a safe world.
Aristotle preferred spheres to other
objects. Euclid who knows?
Plato wouldn’t allow poets in his perfect
world.
What do they know? Instinct takes over in
lower life forms,
but humans—regardless of behavioral
genetics claims
against free will—humans are the only
species who know
that they know but need to kick it around,
think it over,
dress it up in allusion, turn it into myth,
digitize it and photoshop it
and back it up in the reptile folder on the jump
drive.
We also have opposing thumbs and the back
ache that follows
bipeds around. Two kinds of humans: those whose backs hurt
all the time and those only some of the
time. Snakes don’t look
like their backs
hurt. Speaking of myth: can they
hypnotize
their victims before striking? Only if the victim has a bird brain.
Can snakes bite after they die, instinct
lingering in the puddle
of cold blood, that first gasp of mortality
turn vicious? Linger
the operative word. It may be grasping at straws to see the spark
of life as an ember. It may also be
mixing metaphors.
If the dunes where we go fishing know where
and how to shift
and guard the island from the storm tides
that arrive on full moons
and won’t stop at anything man made but get soaked up
or worn
out or something by dunes [it’s not just the sand, it’s the grass too]
then you’d think anything is possible, even
Ouija spelling.
In some dimension dunes have to be endless. Chances are
there are five dimensions at least. You’d wonder at least.
When I let the dogs out of the laundry room
in the morning
and it’s still dark out and no moon,
there’s a flash of green
that I can only see when I’m not looking. No
one else can see it.
Hello? Stuff like that you can’t plan ahead. Near the dog food can
in the garage a snake
has draped its skin. The dog food
brings mice and the mice bring snakes. They are tiny,
necklaces small and clever enough to move
in and out the gap
between the inside and the outside, under the gasket and over
the ramp, or disappear from the corner of
your eye
through the crack between the garage and
the crawl space
and at that moment and only at a glance
they are in two spaces
at once.
Pretty quantum for something that exists
outside Schrodinger’s Box. There’s the wave
theory of light
and the particle theory of light, at least
there used to be back when
I took Physics for Poets, and there’s the squiggly
theory
of reconciliation that I made up and didn’t
help my grade.
Where I work I submit a budget that the dean’s
money people
question and their questions are like those
word problems
asking if train A leaves the station at 8
AM heading south
at 40 MPH and then train B down the track
starts north at 30 MPH
an hour later, the question is when and where they meet
and what then? My question is couldn’t we call train A
something else? The Orange
Blossom Special with fiddles
for locomotion? Something with heartbreak
and biorhythm.
What if a neighbor’s son was on the trestle
and had nowhere
to leap but down? There was a river down there
with a current and there are word problems involving
rowboats
in rivers with currents. The last time I
saw him
he and his girlfriend were in full bloom sitting
on a bale of hay
in our field and making out as if all the world’s
doors were closed,
curtains drawn, oblivious to oblivion, a moment
that still breaks the collective neighborhood
heart into pieces
smaller than grains of sand that were already too small
even for the other worlds you mainly find in
poems.
His dad used to come fishing but then he
moved away
and started over. What scared me as a kid
were not the monster sized monsters but the
small ones,
not the beasts that roared but the ones
that spoke,
not dinosaurs but snakes, not the snakes
with fangs
but the ones who needed you to move close
and listen,
not the lies but the truth. Its hiss.
I came upon this poem in the latest issue of Nimrod International Journal which
is produced by The University of Tulsa, and what a joy it is to come upon a poet
who you have never heard of before, whose work you like so much it makes you
leap about and shout for joy! (I did google, thinking - hmm, maybe he is a one
poem poet, but no. I found another delightful poem out there in cyberspace.)
I got in touch with Daniel Becker to ask if I could post his poem and he
presented me with a conundrum. Nimrod had asked him to reconfigure his
original draft to make the lines shorter. That was the version I read. But
Daniel sent me the original version, which he said he preferred. I saw nothing
at all wrong with the poem I read in Nimrod, (I was enchanted by it) but as
Daniel prefers his original, I am going with that one.
BIO
Daniel Becker practises and teaches internal medicine at the University Of
Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville, Virginia.
