As cats bring their smiling <br />mouse-kills and hypnotised birds, <br />slinking home under the light <br />of a summer's morning <br />to offer the gift of a corpse, <br /> <br />you carry home the snake you thought <br />was sunning itself on a rock <br />at the river's edge: <br />sun-fretted, gracile, <br />it shimmies and sways in your hands <br />like a muscle of light, <br />and you gather it up like a braid <br />for my admiration. <br /> <br />I can't shake the old wife's tale <br />that snakes never die, <br />they hang in a seamless dream <br />of frogskin and water, <br />preserving a ribbon of heat <br />in a bone or a vein, <br />a cold-blooded creature's <br />promise of resurrection, <br /> <br />and I'm amazed to see you shuffle off <br />the woman I've know for years, <br />tracing the lithe, hard body, the hinge of the jaw, <br />the tension where sex might be, that I always assume <br />is neuter, when I walk our muffled house <br />at nightfall, throwing switches, locking doors.<br /><br />John Burnside<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/snake-6/
