Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776

from Wampanoag Traveler

155 BrenDAn gAlvin from Wampanoag Traveler Six foot of mingled orange, tawny, and black, its underside leaden, a rattlesnake I kept for study in an empty rum keg, thinking the vapors would befuddle him, one morning lay in wait under that cover when I came with a snared chipmunk, and struck my hand, pumping green poison in. I knew I had only minutes, so cornered a chicken in the yard, breaking her neck with a quick upward jerk, and with the selfsame knife as I had hacked my murderer to portions, which yet rolled and snapped along the floor as though each worked to produce its own head, I split the hen’s belly and plunged the insulted hand into her still-working jellies and hot lights, whereon I swear the thing’s feathers wilted and began dropping away. That serpent I kicked piece by piece to the hearthfire, and soon began a splutter and popping of fats, a whooshing of steam among the flames, while on my hand the fowl, now black as though itself roasted there, stunk in a way the Devil was in the room. It too I added to the fire, its vile smoke offered heavenward, then wrapped the hand with a plaster. Along their routes veins stood and flared to the elbow, though I plunged the arm in a bucket of vinegar and waited upon Fate. A tree tingled and grew from the tips of my fingers, swelling itself up my forearm until with a razor I opened my palm and let my own blood flow. 156 gArnet poems I rolled and steeped some days upon my bed, waking at times to discover the arm itself a mottled snake, its arrowhead buried and drinking at the chambers of my heart. In dreams and awake I was rolled in lowly places, sumps of the deepest hollows, among the pulp and lichens of tumbled, ancient deadfall, cobwebbed, prickled with my own drenched bedding. At times I even seemed to myself a tree, toes feeling downward toward groundwater, at my extremities these woody prongs, scaled, soft-pithed, where juices wended toward the terminal buds, which were lapped over and sometimes in my fevers flowered, blue-lipped, orange at heart, or rosy and black-veined, and again like gold-wormed feather dusters. I was possessed at times with fears and watchings. Then vermin drew near, their faces large as my own, lights malefic in their ebony eyes, each sentient hair distinct, their mouth parts working, warning against ambulations into their kingdoms. Some evenings I was settled with cooler moments, and at dusk, from the swamp and beyond, a surf of sound arose as from another village in there. I could pick out some drunkard or madwoman’s denials, but not attach them to the screech owl, and sounds like someone hacking brush, and breaths blown across the mouths of flasks. I reflected how these mortal troubles began when I listened almost from the cradle while the yellow rail sounded, and a flycatcher whistled, desultory. Later I stood hours on the threshold of that bush world, thinking the pygmy owl’s bark a pup crying somewhere, boxing the air at the end of its tether, and one day entered a few feet in. 157 BrenDAn gAlvin Now at times it seemed I wandered unattended in landscapes where maroon leaves of the oak formed metallic masks, and was observed from thickets by eyes cognizant of my passage there, and heard such chuckles, small laughter and rattling, I imagined the mice dicing, hands pressed on their mouths. In the few hours of clarity vouchsafed me, I was capable of depicting the seed vessel of a lotus, with threatening holes where the pips were cast, and land snails nearby, a rubythroat in arrested flight, grasping a serpentine branch above a hollowed log whose sockets menaced me. That bird stares where a green lizard emerges from a cover of pickerelweed, engorging a bullfrog by the head, the frog’s feet clawing air. A green miasma ran in me yet. ...