Nonsequitor Snake Poem

Late this afternoon I stood in another woman's kitchen uptown, in my exercise clothes, which I hadn't actually exercised in, and listened as she told me about the news she'd heard from Miami.

The Daily Show, actually: That's where she'd heard it, and I thought: Of course; that's where the news is now.

Not really news, I guess, although she was quite serious in the telling. Anacondas--escaped from a pet store during a hurricane--were breeding and migrating west and north, out of Florida, where enormous reptiles and amphibians can live in the rest of America's collective fear space, coming north, perhaps as far north as New York, and could grow so large as to eat a dog, which is what she said, although I suspected "small child" was what she wanted to say. More shock value. Better audience pleaser.

And I stood there, surrounded by oak paneling and white subway tile, and an eight-burner Viking range, and the sounds of the household as backdrop, and listened to her talking, gesticulating, raised my eyebrows to please her, shook my head in dismay, and tried to picture one, an anaconda, but all I could see were the tiny slithering garter snakes of my childhood, which could make me jump but never truly afraid. nonsequitor

And as she talked, and I tried harder--a swamp from a movie scene, my imaginary snakes increasingly cartoonish, buffoonish, fangless, really, in every possible way--my eye lit upon something I'd never noticed in years of standing in this woman's kitchen: a snake, a thin wooden carving of a snake, hanging vertically by the old butler's pantry, by the window, the open window, spring on the other side of the glass, filtering in through the inch of open space at the bottom, and the park, green at last, or intimations of it anyway, just across the street.