of the green that they lie on
the branch as long friends the supple length familiarly overlaid never
stop moving warm comfortable on each other as two
hands of a body they on either end of the long green slide raise
a bone head facet hard as topaz emerald
of course the hard of the head at the end of the long soft of
the one limb the one muscle moving at every moment from a different
leverage their beauty their extreme beauty is the way from
an inferred fulcrum somewhere on that body they raise a little head sending
the eyes and tongue the intelligence periscoping out the
quality of the movement the perfection without hezitation the
trained muscle of the body supporting the head all of it limbless
organized a single neck a head and
a neck that's it the head and its limb raising it
turning it and the head for the tongue which is in advance of
it all fanning the air tasting licking the air ffflickering the
forked tongue in motion visible at many points
the head at either end does not batter its cage it feels
out tastes it climbs the glass hill of the edge climbs
and on a dark in which it sees its elegant double arching to-ward itself it
sees also shapes moving in the reptile house
next door in the next glass-sided room some
houseplants and lightbulbs
the black mamba she's fatter she's
asleep
green mambas / black mambas
the poison sisters
this is a shape of will snakes do not appall
they are the scary gift of an idea subversion
version version turning in their aquarium
drywalled on one side with a mirror four snakes as I
think them - although any head in there can
only see three, four is the story
the absent sister who is always there and whose reflection I am meant to
be
he is off to the side she round in
her hip lounges toward the tree and the snake looks into her eyes
the two of them do not look away from the eyes held but
humorously as the apple just out of
periferal vision but without fumbling
down at belly level is exchanged
you whip you
braided silk choker
lover
the snake was never male least of all the snake
in my belly wound like the long worms of the gothic dead but
warm and in my very warm sleeping and waking
simultaneous with my hunger rousing and playing for its own reason emerging
imagining that flickering tongue knowing as nobody
knows justly how little how exactly how slightly to move snake
it is you of course i desire phantom yourself in a reptile-skinned woman
but let it be you sucking your own tongue in concentration
the shape of the snake's head forward forebrain a
physiognomy of intelligence and you are it old woman snake no question
you're it the ideal lover enlightenment
snakes and snake charmers
- snake-bird
- snake fence
- snake fly
- Snake River
- snakeroot
-
- snake an order serpentees in
the class of reptilees elongate animals without limbs
or eyelids
the gape of its mouth is tremendous, it pulls itself forward over
and around its food
no snakes have a larynx or vocal cords and in consequence none have
a true voice
their poison is a protein which acts either to paralyse, temporary,
if you can continue to breathe you survive, or to break up the blood corpuscles
and vessel linings from
this swelling and gangrene
the mambas are aggressive and neurotoxic arboreal and
terrestrial of the family elapidae which includes cobras and
coral snakes touched
at the fulcrum touched at the point of the apple o beautiful lady she whips
thrashes hisses
and love flies back to the memory of how she does it
celebrate the delusion carry her why not sow her in all these
days to shoot up pictures and satisfactions o not a version she lives
in or warms but one to warm me
and as for you come to gripping with her her her turning in the catalogue
of friends phantoms each other's friends phantoms the snake's my rival
that too mamba and cobra don't forget there's venom in me for you,
snake sssnake
your tissure of lies your issue of lies to write
out of trouble and necessity would mean snake to describe you to death
describe you to death
black sisters my glittering muses
speaking a tablature understood in fragments their language
the shape and accenting runs like music and is understood in the dreamland
where once i will have lived, and yet i was silenced beside them as they
speak asleep next to them black
sisters speaking endlessly it is time i should tap you at the knees and
make off with what there is to know the poison by which
survivors shine