Daddy Killed a Rattler
If, when you lift your thighs, they unstick
with a rip from hot vinyl—if the knob,
from the station wagon’s back seat, is just
out of reach, & Limbaugh’s on, rasping
about the AIDS epidemic, then surely
it’s 1991, you’re seven years old,
& this is a kind of hell. & “spurious”,
not yet in your vocabulary, will not
harrow you. So, when you peer over
the hot tan sill, how will it seem if daddy,
a possible savior, stands, staring at
day-olds, in the middle of Puritan
Bakery, unblinking for 20 minutes?
Thousands are dying. It’s impossible
to cure, & the dread you feel reminds you
of the night dad killed a rattler. Reminds you
not of the way it moved, but of hearing
later, at dinner, how the poison works.
How it turns the skin black. Kills cells so wounds
won’t close. How the little ones are worse,
because they haven’t learned to stop the venom’s
flow, lithe windows won’t roll down, the car
will get hotter, & Rush will never shut up.
Even when his terms are big, the gist is clear,
so you try your best, with too-short shorts
to cover your thighs, while piecing together
what “gay” is. But what do you know? You know
how to read, how to pull weeds, dribble a ball.
You know the blindspots of grasshoppers,
how to cup your hands to make them spring
against your palms—you know you & Pete
are best friends, but you don’t know what it means
when he wants to touch you. You know nothing.
Then someone tells you you are the wound—
that disembodied voice, that germ in the blood
that lasts a decade, fear you tune your ear to,
the hiss, rattle, shift in the grass, the rush
through the static—then cruel,
quick, with a spade, as if with a spear,
five jabs & a flick, daddy cut its head
from its body.
After supper, you went
outside to look at the rattler, & the mouth,
slow, without throat, still opened into
nothing, closing, opening again,
while the dizzy-patterned lengths, writhed
free of the spade’s shallow pan, looping blood
black in the dull red sand—
But if, even in death,
the eye, black slit unmoving, with animal
knowing, was still tuned to that weary
music, believing yet, even in wrecked concert,
it may inject its poison—if, when you sat close
& listened, that split tongue seemed to hold
a secret about you & it, when you open
your mouth, may nothing coil there to speak it.
Gabriel J. Kruis
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