night

Lucky for us a snake lived under that house,

The house where lightning struck.

Years went by, snow fell occasionally.

The snake one night came in as we slept.

A whole lifetime dreamt away in that night.

Snowmen made, angels in the snow frozen

Momentarily in time, the neighbor’s bird

Escaping one day, out among the palm trees

And vanishing into its name, its cry

On the treetops that nobody heard.

The hills protected us when the sky

Broken open fell hard through its opening

And the impact threw us back on our knees.

But mostly the summer monsoons kept

Their promise even when we didn’t pray,

Even as we made of our solitudes day

After day a secret invisible play

That we freely partook of, until we slept

To the sound of cicadas humming, whirring

That August night when the snake came visiting

And I, blurry-eyed, fumbling the next morning

Down the dark stairwell, half-awake, feeling

The sudden weight of our rice finch’s cage

Pulling me down until I looked. When I saw

The coiled guest inside I didn’t know what I saw,

But the terror seizing my throat proclaimed what

It knew and we, my wife and son and I, raced

Together down those stairs where we thought

Up quick solutions to the presence of what we faced

There, poised and unconcerned, waiting for its

Destiny and ours to be played out. “Kill it! Kill it!”

Was one avenue to be taken; a knife was called for

But a camera appeared handy to counter disbelief

As we shot picture after picture but not before

Considering our pet rice finch ‘Lucky’s’ fate,

By then a lumpy outline bulging from one coil

Showing what our guest ate

During the night, a meal for the special

Occasion that we knew, later, it was.

We left the cage door open and watched him

Slither away through the grass softly, imperious as

The darkness he had stolen inside our house under,

And as he took his leave we, silent and grim,

Stood in the doorway watching, heartbeats

Crashing through our thoughts as the scene repeats

Itself amid the clamorous, sacred, random thunder

Of remembrance where, in a new house now, 

In a new life, I see, yes, how 

We all become what we are meant to be,

We are all incredibly, miraculously,

Luminously lucky. 

Botsford, Alan. A Book of Shadows. Katydid Books, 2003.