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Wednesday, September 28, 2005

S N A K E



A snake came to my water trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat,
To drink there.


In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree

I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait,
for there he was at the trough
before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the
edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,

He sipped with this straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slick long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,

And stooped amd drank a little more,

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of earth

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily, the black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man,

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But I must confess how I liked him,

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my
water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless

Into the burning bowels of this earth?


Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?

Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honored?
I felt so honored.


And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,

But even so, honored still more

That he should seek my hospitality

From out of the dark door of the secret earth.


He drank enough

And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,

And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing into the air,

And slowly turned his head,

And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice a dream

Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round

And climb again the broken bank of my wall face.


And has he put his head into that dreadful hole,

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered
further,
A sort of horror a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that
horrid black hole.
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself
after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.


I looked round, I put down my pitcher,

I picked up a clumsy log

And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.


I think it did not hit him;

But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in
undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone

Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front

At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.


And immediately I regretted it.

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!

I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.


And I thought of the albatross,

And I wished he would come back, my snake.


For he seemed to me like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.

And I have something to expiate:

A pettiness.


~D. H. Lawrence

hat tip and
much gratitude to
Steve Toth

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