There Is a Snake
This isn’t a metaphor. And I’m
not the snake. He was really there,
then slithered into the short grass,
under the bushes that to him
must’ve been enormous, good
cover, then into the small forest
where I couldn’t see him.
So I continued along the trail.
Here, I might as well say it:
I pushed him off the path.
I was worried a bicycle
would gut him. I grabbed
a stick and sent him. I still want to let him
just be a snake.
What else could a snake want?
Mice, water, underbrush, somewhere
to hide, a hole to carve out
channels, span the length
of this brush, narrow
dirt capillaries to explore …
And what could I give him
but a poke? I said I wasn’t
the snake and it’s true. When I slither
under the grass I crawl along
on my arms. While the snake
disappears, you can see much more
than the outline of my body.
Copyright © 2024 by Bess Cooley. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Bess Cooley is a winner of The Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and her work has also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, American Literary Review, The Journal, and Verse Daily, among other publications. She is the co-founding editor of Peatsmoke Journal and teaches at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Tagged: Book Excerpt, Poetry
