I was embarrassed in a garter snake’s presence.
—I’d screamed when it slithered under my hand
as I leaned to pick the first ripe blueberry.
It was noon, a Monday in late July. I thought
I was alone in the green world, no one but
a cool snake to observe I’m not a cool woman.
The sun, as always, was hot on my shoulders,
hot on the back of my blouse. I’d forgotten
the universe wasn’t all dead pines and Indian
graves and boarded-up houses, that I wasn’t
the only creature left alive in it, that I’d
never found my comfortable place inside it.
I wanted to be someone who doesn’t scare,
who can’t be shaken, so I wanted no witnesses
to this paradigm in the Garden. Then, the snake
slid noiselessly under the rotting porch
of our family cottage. The reduced summer woods,
the wide sky, were stunned and silent. Imagine
a silence, all you hear your own scream vanishing.
A second before, you’d knelt to the ground,