Saturday, January 25, 2020

Won't cures eruct now?


    “Snake Eye

1.
Pyjamas, the first thing on the list
when they said hospital. You chose
the pattern yourself, whorls of snakes
in blue-greens, intricate.

I packed your bag crushing
the pyjamas under apples and books.
In pyjamas I do not know you.

In bed I wake.
The moon threads the curtains,
the brasseyes of the bed stare.
The dream-serpent wakes me.

2.
In the leaves of the jungle—
gummy greenness.
Netted against mosquitoes,
I watch the snake’s guerrilla

colours slide from under the Virgin’s
foot. No. I will not move the net
to look. In the fabric of your pyjamas,
in the cross-hatching of my skull,
he has found a home.

3.
In sudden winter
the house lies
down in snow.
Fear sloughs off
his skin and lodges
in my eye sockets;
the guest, shifteyed
ophidian, secures
his habitation.”

--Clairr O’Connor, in: Pillars of the House: an Anthology of Verse by Irish Women 1690 to the Present (ed. A A Kelly, 1987)

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