Backbone > Poetica

Eited by Phil Levine

The Snake at the End

She didn’t want to watch
the black snake uncoiling its wetness
on the laurel branch.

I insisted & lifted the four foot skin
as clear as finger nail
onto the end of my walking stick
to admire the pattern of scales
from tail rings to belly planks to eyelid bubbles.
The nose wore the mark of a wishbone.

She found it repulsive
that I carried this souvenir on my stick
as eager as a boy with a new baseball pennant
all the way down Slide Mountain
to decorate my new cabin.

She left before
I draped the skin on my mantelpiece,
expanding the still life display of chalky deer bones,
birch bark scrolls, pine cones,
and the red sumac flower
standing in a vase like a velvet microphone.

After a month, she filed papers
& the snake skin smelled like a wet dog.
Now I was beginning to learn how things decay,
but not always for the worse. The mushroom that melted
overnight into a black puddle on my journal table
varnished the wood with an odor of licorice
I hadn’t savored since childhood.

—WILL NIXON

Lake Champlain

We could hear Louis Armstrong
if the wind blew right.
Across the lake, we
listened to the baby

sitter’s stories
of what they did to children
in Germany in the tunnels,
my mother’s cigarette, a

firefly on the porch across
the dark jade grass, a
night light. I imagined
hair straight as the

girl at the rink with
one green eye, one blue
one, her gaze hypnotic
as the stories of what

people might do. I
didn’t know what
might uncoil in the night.
Or that, though I felt

I was storing up sun,
catching light like
minnows, in the fall
ahead there wouldn’t
be one night I didn’t

wake up screaming
in dreams of fire

—LYN LIFSHIN

The Leopard

Ride his broad back
Of tempo and timbre
Ridgeline of spine
And length of charging femur

Cling to his mane-less neck
As he charges headlong down ravine
And leaps snarling from tree to tree

Refuse to relinquish
Your fevered tenuous hold
Of slick resinous fur
As he slows to stalk the savannah
Growling his contempt for you, limpet
Wishing you belly up and nude
Under his bloody maw

Tell him under your catching breath
That you have come to know him
That you hold him to learn what it is
That makes leopard, leopard

Is it the side-swaying belly
The pugnacious jaw
The veiled eyes

The ephemeral receptors
That fire his nose’s imagination
The stamping hurling coils
Of his loins

The dense bones crowned with jewels
Of glistening cartilage
That float across one another
Transiting weight and force
Effortlessly as air bearings

Or is it his mind
Calm as storm
Toroidal hemispheres enclosing
Fields of sparking hunt
And the patience of stars

As implacable and unflappable
As water over rock
Lightning flaking stone
And numinous clouds
Breaking day

—SAMUEL CLAIBORNE

Listening Poem #1

Talking makes truth scarce.
As we unwind our latest chapters
Cross out questions
make things hold
the ragged end that is our living
cannot be wrapped around us
for warmth
it was made to tatter loudly
in the wind
wake us with its snapping
make us hear the sky

—JEFF GARRETT

You can submit up to three poems to CHRONOGRAM at a time. Send via snail or e-mail. Poetica. PO Box 459. New Paltz, New York 12561. E-mail: info@chronogram.com. Subject: Poetica.