how to kill a snake
How to Kill a Snake
Step One:
Accept what you just saw in the darkening light of your front yard.
What was once a garden, a sanctuary, a place for flowers to
Bloom
And children to play
Is shadowed by an unknown, currently unnamed
Visitor. No –
Invader.
Diamond hitch markings and a head like brass.
Step Two:
Accept that you cannot ignore it.
Slithered under a bush and out of sight, it’s not better to let
Sleeping
Snakes
Lie.
You put out your cigarette, go inside
Put your thick boots on,
Jeans in summer,
Put on armor, anything too thick to pierce with fangs like sewing needles.
Step Three:
Accept that you will try to talk yourself out of it.
And that while walking through the bushes you will pray you were mistaken.
You will try to distrust your own eyes.
“I didn’t see that, trick of the light, a piece of a rotting leaf moved in the breeze and this is an
Over-
Reaction”
But in your belly you know what you saw.
Pray, then, for a misidentification.
A snake by any other name would be less deadly.
Pray that you made the mistake –
Even though you’ve been identifying snakes your whole goddamn life.
Step Four:
Accept, once you see it again in the high beam of a flashlight,
That the snake must die.
Copperhead. You named it correctly.
Its namesake carries weight and visions of dead dogs and children, screaming sirens of ambulances and a constant pressure on the wound.
The snake did not choose this, like so many choices of people that lead them to a dangerous place.
The snake did not choose his name.
Step Five:
Accept the palm to the shovel.
The weathered wood grain on skin, the heft of a blunt object but also the weight of intention
To kill.
Hear the quick guillotine, a whistle through the air.
Kill the snake.
And maybe see yourself in it — too much
The ability to fight and flail even though there is no going back,
Nothing to repair the damage.
No chance.
Step Six:
Accept the next motions, automatically,
As you’ve been told.
Spout the series of events on autopilot.
A. Collect
B. Wait
C. Dig
D. Bury
You collect the jigsawed snake in a shoebox. Wrap it in a towel.
There is always danger in a dying thing.
You wait until the morning sun is hot on your back
even through the canopy of leaves.
You dig a hole a foot and a half down with the same blunt force
And the same blunt object.
You bury the unboxed snake in the hole, and sob a song
No one will ever hear.
Step Seven:
Accept the arguments you will have with yourself.
Did you do the right thing?
What if it had bitten one of the children?
Did you have to kill a living thing?
Why did you even have to see it in the first place?
Step Eight:
Accept the fact that this poem is no longer about the snake.
Step Nine:
Accept that there was no dignity in its death, exactly like there was no dignity
In the quiet death of the future you will never have.
And how the thud of his body in a hole
Unceremoniously dug with a rusted shovel made the same sound
as the removal of your engagement ring.
And just as empty.
Step Ten:
Accept the facts:
You Killed the Snake
You Filled the Hole
You Packed the Dirt
You Walked Away
Alive.