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