YEARS BEFORE I MOVED INTO THE RENOVATED FARMHOUSE

YEARS BEFORE I MOVED INTO THE RENOVATED FARMHOUSE

Years before I moved into the renovated farmhouse,

the previous owner told me

he had to go down to the lake

and shotgun the rat snakes

that were dripping like powerlines out of the trees

to keep the campers from freaking out.

Rat snake. Biggest constrictor in Canada

found in the Rideau Lakes region of Eastern Ontario.

Black anthracite that can grow up to nine feet

when they’re stretched out like rubber

some hotshot laid down the highway.

They nest in the southern exposure of boggy fields

rotten logs and compost heaps

that have been abandoned to the wild,

water to water, air to air, earth to earth

and anchor their fangs in rats and birds and frogs

and other small mammals

they crush in their coils like vicious inner tubes.

And they’re not afraid of humans if you mess with them.

And they swim like wavelengths of dark energy

the way Nureyev used to dance.

The good farmers stop their trucks

to take a stick and shoo them off the road

like defamed angels that keep their silos free of pests,

but the morons run over them

like those hoses the Minister of Highways

stretches across the road

to count the number of cars that use it.

And if you get too close they turn into

three on the floor spring-loaded Hirsch shifts

that can bite back like a midnight special

in a game of Russian roulette.

They’re the reptile version of a black hole

when it’s acting more like a wave than a particle,

a linear eclipse that moves as eloquently

as water on the moon in the Sea of Shadows

or a loose strand of the Medusa

letting her hair down like an oilslick

to rinse the conditioner out of it in the river Styx.

Shock of black in the tall yellow grass

they can move as quick as electricity

or make your heart stand still

like the sun above Jericho in cardiac arrest.

Dark rosaries with nothing to confess

as they unsheathe themselves like the daggers

of the assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain

sliding through the darkness to seize the night

carpe nocte, by the throat, by the heart,

one tiny locket of life after another

beating on the doors of their panicked hearts

from the inside to get out.

And you can’t help associate evil with them

or Darth Vader, even though

they shine and shimmer

like irridescent boat-tailed grackles in the sun

and at night as I once saw one swimming beside me

like a parallel line of anti-matter

that threatened me with utter annihilation

should we ever converge,

I’ve seen the moon flash off their scales

like waves of black lake water

as she shed her skin like the Milky Way

just to get as naked as they are

when she went skinny-dipping

with one of her oldest totems

to renew her virginity

as the epiphany in the mirror

of a Black Madonna, priestess, oracle, muse

that can arouse the lowest

to the heights of prophecy

like black rat snakes with the wings of dragons

on sacred glyphs of the god Iawa

who reconciles all opposites

by turning scales into feathers.

Snakes always keep their secrets to themselves

and startle us with the power of myth

to embody in such as these

the tragic and the true in a species facing extinction.

I’ve always tried to keep my distance from them

as if they were some kind of mutable event horizon

and though I once saw a girl in a bikini

wrap herself in one at an outdoor art exhibition

in Bon Echo Park like a poster child of Freud,

and it just lay there with its head between her breasts

like a spent symbol on the pschent of Cleopatra,

the oracle at Delphi, Alexander’s mother,

I’m too much of a warm blooded mammal

not to respect something so dangerously old

that looks at you with a wicked grin

and two black lidless eyes

its body followed like a colon

that knows everything that could happen next

because it’s seen it all happen before

like black serpent lightning shooting up your chakras

out through the crown of your head

like a lightning rod in shock

that it got all its Kundalini connections crossed.

Now imagine after the shotgun blast

snake meat flying through the air,

snake-blood gone supernova,

snake-skin bursting into shreds of black balloon,

snake-guts, hearts, lungs, eyes, tongues, fangs

landing on the rocks, the lake, the trees, the flowers,

food for ants, crows, maggots, coydogs, and turkey-vultures.

By the dozens, as the shotgun boomed across the bay

like the drum roll of an echo in an executioner’s hood

as if Jacque de Molay were being burnt that day

with the last of the Templars.

Darkness demonized into extinction

to keep the campers from freaking out

so they could play at communing with nature

for two hundred dollars a week.

A canoe. A cottage. A man-made beach.

Just you. And nature. And the shadows

of the rat snakes sliding down out of the trees

like a black veil of blood descending like night

down upon the stage of your campfire

where you’re making up ghost stories

like last curtain call before lights out

and under the blossom of your tent

you dream of the innocence

of dark mysterious things

that have been eradicated for your convenience.

You dream you see Isis dropping her veils

and you look deeply into the eyes of the Queen of Heaven

through a canvas flap in a burqa of safety-nets.

And the silence is a requiem for rat snakes.

And the death of the darkness

makes the light a little less convincing,

and the stars shine a little paler by contrast,

and the candles wane uninspired

to dance with lesser shadows.

PATRICK WHITE