This is-- I think this poem--
this poem came out of an experience
that I had a long time ago when I was about to jump off
the step and my daughter who was three at the time
said, don't there's a rattlesnake there.
And I was barefooted too and I was about
ready to jump on top of this prairie rattler.
That was all just a couple of feet from the snake.
But it came back to me in a very different context
than I had expected it would.
"Homophobia."
[LAUGHTER]
"I can say that discovering such ugliness in a friend
is like standing on my own porch barefoot and ready
to jump into the sweet grass still soft with spring newness
and finding coiled--
its outline broken by fractals of sand,
the blunt, venomous head of a prairie rattler lying
in wait, striking out at whatever comes within range
of its desire or fear.
Throwing itself forward, the snake
would be as certain of its normality as my friend is.
Coiled around the memory of the man who
died rattling with indignation at the news
that he died of AIDS.
And I, I could be the mouse frozen with timidity
having blundered on an exceptionally beautiful morning
into this toxic stare.
Struck down on the spot, the hypothermic lullaby
poisoning my conscience as much as the muscles of my throat
and heart, but the snake is beautiful.
Those diamonds etched along its spine as nearly green
as the fragrant sage.
And the mouse, the mouse being swallowed would become a muse.
Itself mother and father of new snake skins
and I could turn back, refrain from jumping off the step,
and the snake would slide into the grass, its body
alongside breathing itself away, leaving
me to thank heaven for such a glimpse and such
a narrow escape.
The snake would not as my friend does
keep flinging itself at a dead man,
talking about how repulsive it must have been.
How shocking to imagine the lovemaking of two
people of the same sex though she keeps imagining it again
and again as if she held her soul at an artificial grip
force its jaws open to the naked drip and chill,
though snake so pryed upon a petri dish,
would be milked of all its poison."