BY ABBY CAPLIN
Snake
A human might call it music,
playing my body; the sun
warms my muscles, blood
red as your children’s,
vibrating in a lively whirling—
arpeggios the sound between
murmuring scales, sideways
in heather. Cowboys, familial
patterned boots of slaughter, you
force your heel into us, but you
cannot travel beyond your vision,
or discern the night’s diamond star-
wave of Serpens, our birthplace.
I rise to face you, from the porch light
of the Goddess, from the ground.
Once, I swam in hawk’s knuckles,
saw my kin below, swallowing
to stay alive, some sisters stilled
upon the false tar snake, staring at silver
suns of moving metal. When I slipped
through, I fell into a madrone and hid;
we are millions among the tree
children—how they giggle, lift their toes
on your sidewalks, your glued cities
already falling apart. I slid into your gathering
places of befoulment, beyond the grates
to Gehenna, where you sacrifice
your innocents. On Minoa, you honored us.
Now, you think how best
to kill, make sport of our divinity,
while I watch you eat…
Of Mere Living
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises…
—Wallace Stevens, “Of Mere Being”
The palm at the end of the mind rises from the pillow
and sends the husband out for cinnamon
and candles. It presses each crease to the page
of day, then palms it—
vacuuming cat hair from the couch. Steaming
the kitchen’s tile floor. It flosses its teeth
and walks around the house emptying trash cans
into a white trash bag, throwing it into the trash
bin and dropping it at the curb
of the house, where we live with my mother-
in-law’s chipped Sabbath china
and dented silver plate,
as though every piece is a prayer book,
rummaging yearly through online recipes
for honey cake that once wadded
soft childhood palates—
But the mind at the end of the palm sees
watercolors and a child’s hand paint
beyond the spaces that are real
into the spaces that seem real.
It wonders what color to pen a life,
or the illusion of one.
It is dusk on a Friday, and God’s sunset
arrives through the basement window
framed with cobwebs.
Inside this conversation hides my father’s
worn fedora, family lives piled into six cubic
feet of cardboard, and wafting from old printed
newsletters is the pine scent
of a Jewish Lithuanian forest—
imprint of snow and red poppies, tang of sour
cream and boiled red beets,
storekeepers and revolutionaries, the tender bite
of Yiddish.
Abby Caplin’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Catamaran, Manhattanville Review, Midwest Quarterly, Salt Hill, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Among her awards, she has been a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry and semi-finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award. She is a physician in San Francisco. http://abbycaplin.com
Process Note: In the poem Snake, I tried to put myself in the mind of a snake, imagine how it might speak if a snake could speak English, and how it might feel about humans, highways, and cities. I wrote “Of Mere Living” in the middle of 2020, deep into the pandemic, when I didn’t leave the house for days. I was watching hours pass, exploring rooms, and thinking about legacy.