The Serpent Speaks

Soul: Look on that fire, salvation walks within.Heart: What theme had Homer but original sin? —William Butler Yeats

And three begot the ten thousand things.—Lao Tzu

I am another vine in the great democracy of vines part of the complexity that defies explanation part of the tree you put your back to alert, but never suspecting. I am the cold coil around the warm trunk, I expand as your lungs, poor rabbits, twitch and swell. I am a long story with lovely yellows and dapples and shades a beginning, middle, and end that you can get lost in a sunny patch followed by a shadow a green dapple and twist, the turn, the unexpected reversal. When you come to the denouement and the tail narrows to nothing you wish to go back to the beginning and start over where the red lie flickers in the leaves beneath eyes like mica moons.

It is the old story, the beginning of everything but really a long divigation and excursus in which the woman naked and trembling complains to the man, weeping over and over, and his voice rises in sharp jabs while all their unborn children listen. It is something that interrupts the afternoon, the first day and history begins and wanders off for millennia, missing the whole point.

It is these subtle shades on my scales this maze of intricate lines that lead back upon themselves in endless recursions that fascinate you, that lead you endlessly from my tail into my mouth. In the moving light of the jungle I am a simple body-stocking of shadows and weave under a fritillary of bird cries to a sensuous music a harmony to all your doings promising you the ultimate knowledge in my belly down the dark tube of years: Light and shadow, light and shadow, the days and nights pass with increasing speed like stations and their intervals and you sway holding the strap the car-lights flickering wondering whatever was your original destination.

When fiction held out its red lie among the roses you followed it down my dark throat. It seemed utterly reasonable. Then you were Methuselah carrying each of his 900 years like a brick on his back Abraham’s wild surmise with knife Joseph starving in a hole and Moses singeing his feet in the wilderness. Next they hung you from two sticks and slowly everything grew more dramatic: Augustine heard the children in the garden Aquinas fled from the naked peasant and Columbus woke in a sweat, the voices still singing of a lost world of amber waves and alabaster until Lord Amherst gave his blankets to the Indians Franklin saw the flashing key and Washington sold his horse for pasturage until the utterly reasonable Robespierre offered up his head Lenin popped from a boxcar and Einstein gave you a terrible secret which I had promised, a man of violins and God.

Now the story has gotten out of hand as you swarm upon yourselves like maggots on a diminishing dung-pile and frenzied, move toward the catastrophe history a string of boxcars each a century stuffed to overflowing until the last leaps the track.

Meanwhile I who am the truth move scintillatingly, with grace in my own shadow telling the story: There was a man, and a woman … and the sun rose and they went on a long journey and night fell and they did not know where they were.

Such is knowledge, such is the fruit I offered without the encumbrances of love, without listening without the tree of fire that burns below all movement, all shining, the tree below the bones whose flames reach through the skeleton and hover just over the fingers and burn away the forest where the ego goes crying, alone—one eye balancing the other bilaterally symmetrical— of what it has and what it hasn’t until all shapes are shining and fear falls way shriveling like a black net and the wisdom of God dances freely before you and the glowing fruit blushes for the mouth.

I see all clear and can tell you the end of things, knowing you will not listen, for my knowledge is cold here in the forest and you will follow the shifting arabesque of moonlight on my mica-glint, my scales moving like the sequins of days, events, the rise of stocks and the next presidential election and the price of wheat futures in a drought.

So I go on, flowing into my own shape into the darkness I have made, subservient (and this is the bitterness beyond all blankness) at the last to another purpose which you cannot guess, which rings in these leaves like the harps and fiddles of insects too high for your range of hearing—a music which drives me into the narrowing circle I have made tail in mouth, swallowing untilI vanishand everything in this circle vanishes with me.

Robert Siegel’s latest books of poetry, The Waters Under the Earth and A Pentecost of Finches, will be out this year and next year.