You have wandered this road for a long time. You have left versions of yourself along the way, like sluffed off skins of earlier snakes.
There are times when longing pulls you back to examine the scraps of tissue paper skin that hint at the nature of these other selves.
But mostly you abandon them in the dust, fascinated by your new, gleaming scales. Your tongue eagerly tastes the air of the future. You stream towards it, excited and blind.
You believe you are an exclamation point instead of a question mark. You believe you are already your goal, singular and slim.
Yet when you arrive, the future is fat and messy with the past. All your filmy selves, like a gang of patchy ghosts, wait for you, holding up sloppy signs advertising their talents, waving them in your face, hoping for employment.
Agast, you pull back. You are nearly an arrow in your sharp ambition. You believe in the target, the bull’s eye, the blissful thunk of the winning shot, the ultimate I am.
You long for a mirror, but all you find are the ghosts that pose and primp, desperate to be chosen.
You reject them all.
Still they surge and crowd around you, calling out their skills like barkers at the circus. Step right up!
They shout. And you are appalled to find yourself smiling, opening your arms, drawing them to you in a great embrace.
And so they get the job, attach themselves until you stand up and become human again, more than human with your multiple arms and writhing hair. You terrify yourself.
With time you become dexterous—all those hands can do so much! Make so much! Help so much! Create on so many levels. And your snake hair dances with the breeze, sees every bird and leaf with its infinite eyes.
But you are not pretty. The simplicity, the grace of arrow and exclamation point have been lost. You are now a bulbous question mark, a constant pregnancy. You waddle like a duck. You quack instead of sing. Heave yourselves aloft as heavily as tree-trimming machines.
Yet your iridescent feathers shine in the sun as if wet, and your hoarse call carries on the wind to a million willing ears…
Until you feel it
All over the world
An invisible lifting of wings
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
Katherine West
Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, Writers Resist, Feminine Collective and Southwest Word Fiesta. New Verse News nominated her poem And Then the Sky for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico, the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado, and the Tombaugh Gallery in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She is also an artist.
