Snake \ Neighbors Strangers To One Another

Alan:  What was it?  Nothing like this should live here.  Seeing it once, we always looked but never found, except within us.

Snake

The snake, big as my arm,

and black, slipped

from the warm ledge

into rough grass – 

vanished.

We felt it must have ruled

this place forever,

until our thumping arrival

changed everything.

It moved, then,

into the thickets and rank weeds

of our memories,

where it emerges, rarely,

to stretch and sun,

blacker than ever,

crowned with gold,

though the actual ledge

is cool now, with a rind

of moss, in the shade

of roses and lilacs.

Nancy:  While recuperating from pneumonia, I temporarily traded my bay for a rivermarsh.

Neighbors Strangers To One Another

We know homely and intimate things about one another.

We know paint/no paint.  We know angles.  I know

that their barn is slumped away from the prevailing wind.

We both know the wide rivermarsh between us

and the ledgy tongue of spruce woods which divides it,

giving us each a false boundary.

They are – this is – the house on the other side

of the marsh.

They know, because the eye is drawn by a kind

of human gravity, when I went to bed,

my light, one star, dark.

I know, because I watched the smoke rise,

that they slept late this morning, that the kindling

was damp, that at last the fire caught.

Maybe we both keep bees.  Maybe we both

favor red hollyhocks.  Maybe we have nothing in common,

but we are important strangers to one another nonetheless.

I am – they are – the neighbors on the other side

of the marsh.