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Killing the Milk Snakes
It couldn't be true, about them drinking from cows,
but milk snakes like to live in the walls of houses.
You call them house snakes. Ours would sun
in the grass right off the front porch on warm days
and slide up under the siding home at night.
It felt good, letting milk snakes come and go,
watching our step around that part of the lawn,
and I didn't mind when a baby snake was crawling
on the kitchen floor in the morning early one spring.
Then we found a dead skin on the living room rug.
I'm not sure why, but it meant we had to kill them.
It's hard to kill snakes you've talked about in poems,
and I'd written "Not to appeal is that milk snake"--
something at home in life that doesn't complain.
I dropped a concrete block off the porch on the first one.
I thought it would leap and hiss and scare me sick
but it never said a word, just made for home,
up under the siding, with a kink where a corner of the block
must have hit. It had a hard time to get that kink
through the hole, and two days later it started to stink.
My wife said I didn't know how to kill a snake right.
I cut the other one down with a hoe. I could see it
sliding off home already, really slow,
the way a snake has of looking like it's not there.
With a hoe you can keep a snake from running away.
First I took off a little piece of the tail,
then three more pieces. Here are my observations:
Down to six inches, that snake never made a move
that wasn't classic. I'm writing a loose pentameter;
if you're going to write in prose you might as well.
I started this poem before I started the killing--
which would you start first, with that much choice left?
I'm tired of the killing we do to keep these houses.
*first appeared in Ironwood
Also from Eric Torgersen:
Love on the Friendship Quilt
I Will Die in Lake Superior
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