Your Sunday Poem

This is by Ellen Bryant Voigt from “Messenger-- New and Selected Poems 1976-2006”

Snakeskin

Down on the porch, the blacksnake
sits like a thick fist.
His back is flexed and slick.
The wedge of his forehead turns
to the sun. He does not remember
the skin shucked in the attic,
the high branches of our family tree.

The moth will not recall the flannel
cocoon. The snail empties the endless
convolutions of its shell. Think
of the husk of the locust,
sewn like an ear to the elm.
How easily they leave old lives,
as an eager lover steps from the skirts
at her ankles.

Sleep corrects memory;
the long sleep of bear and woodchuck,
the sleep of the sea,
the sleep of the wooden spool unwinding,
the sleep of snow, when houses lose
their angles and edges, the slow
sleep of no dreaming;
and we could rise up in new skins
to a tall confusion of green,
to the slick stalks of grasses,
and the catalpa, that beany tree, offering
its great, white, aromatic promise.

Your Sunday Poem

This fiercely unblinking poem is by Ellen Bryant Voigt, from her new book: Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006

THE HEN

The neck lodged under a stick,
the stick under her foot,
she held the full white breast
with both hands, yanked up and
out,
and the head was delivered of the
body.
Brain stuck like a lens; the profile
fringed with red feathers.
Deposed, abstracted,
the head lay on the ground like a
coin.
But the rest, released into the
yard,
language and direction wrung
from it,
flapped the insufficient wings
and staggered forward, convulsed,
instinctive –
I thought it was sobbing to see it
hump the dust,
pulsing out those muddy juices,
as if something deep in the
gizzard,
in the sack of soft nuggets,
drove it toward the amputated
member.
Even then, watching it litter the
ground
with snowy refusals, I knew it was
this
that held life, gave life
and not the head with its hard
contemplative eye.