Though I Hold Nothing against Snakes but Fear, and: Oconee Station Falls, and: Red Hills

Though I Hold Nothing against Snakes but Fear

From out the dark door of the secret earth.

—D. H. Lawrence

I say to my husband, Get a knife. I say that.

The dying water snake, fat as a rope, a rhythm of bulges,but from what? I guess fish, then frogs.Make up your mind, he says. Frogs. The rest is silence

until his knife, sliding down the bright belly,makes a ripping sound. This is after the snake is shotand pulled from the rock pile rimming the pond— he did it for me or if not for me, a perception of me—after it's flung into the wheelbarrow where it writhes,but only slightly, even now, when slit down the belly,even now when the gray sacks of baby snakesare scraped out. The mother snakewrithes once or twice more, but only slightly,until the sting of gasoline.

That's when she pulses into a braid, tighter and tighter,tail thrashing, hard, against metal, her mouthworking open and closed. I know better, and so does hedespite old farm ways of drenching hornets and bees.What is it we think we need to be rid of? We both know better. With my fingernail I dig into the cuticle of my thumbuntil it bleeds. The sun, still shining,and the belly now rinsed of red.

Dark between the rocks. Unsettled, too,the fish in the pond, lipping the water's surface. Who owns this place anyway? Ours, not ours.The snake lies dead in the wheelbarrow,and all the little snakes. Fifteen, I counted.Something flies are attracted to, no longer fit for vultures or crows.

Once I could say I had never harmed a snake.Along a wooded trail I'm one who prays for a dividebetween my path and where a snake intends to be.I who admired the bright orange, the orange leather of the belly and the striped jellyof the babies that, before the gasoline,had just begun to wriggle.

I go inside in an unforgiving moodand look out the sunroom window, surprisedthe pond is still there, its rocks, water lilies in bloom,a few white disks of hibiscus.

Oconee Station Falls

Trailhead sign: Bears have been sightedfrequently in this area.

Because I came alone,forgot my bear bell and all bears like warning,because the trail is long and, occasionally, steep.

Because the crow's wingis a flag flapping in heavy windand I am tired of singing.

What good this frail walking stick?What good my song?

If I stoop to admire the orange-throated mushroomdo I turn my back?Thunder. And drops smacking the path.Which is worse, the too-frequent bearor the too-close lightning with tattoo of rain?Two-thirds of the way there and good sense says turn around.I am an old woman needing comfort,needing sunlight and birdsong, the falls.One glimpse of the falls.

Some things cannot be cast behind.

Hard to walk fast enough, singingand talking away thunder, the too-frequent bear.In my heart, this thunder.From nowhere, believe me, this bear.

Red Hills

after Georgia O'Keeffe

I come to these hills ready to be lost.Tell me which path: shadowof quick decisions, shadow of no sleep.I take shadow to mean the blue wearinessof doubt. I take light for what it is,absence no one objects to.

Some moments are that clear, a loose weavedraped flawlessly across the day.How to shoulder the weight,part memory, part grudge? A day of walkingit'll take to shake this old umbrage.Some paths are erasures,

bird, tree, stone no longer thereor no longer wished for. Forget the pathand let the slope stand for slope.A slight curve, call it a valley,like the one behind a bent knee.

Think of the past and feel bathed in it.

The game was hide and seek,when in the vast...