Elizabeth Jacobson: Next to You, Permanence

I wrapped the corpse of a juvenile bull snake I found on the road

around a slender branch of a young aspen tree,

coiling it into three even loops. The fluid

from the snake’s body collected in its head,

which swelled to many times its normal size.

The next day, flies covered the body so thickly

I could not tell a snake was what they clung to.

On the third day, the snake hung like jerky from its branch,

the coils undone,

the skin split in places where delicate white bones pushed through.

This is what I was hoping for,

skin dropping away without a scent,

a helix of bones to set on my desk,

next to phantasms of you.

On the fourth day, when the snake began to move,

bulges under its desiccated skin rippled

like small hearts toward a new home

and I saw what was dead about the snake

had become the maggots of new life—

that the span from a seed, to the echo of what does

not change— is unbearable.

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Elizabeth Jacobson’s second book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch.  

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(c) 2019 by Parlor Press. Used with permission.