we stitch the earth

Jorie Graham--


I Watched a Snake

hard at work in the dry grass
        behind the house
catching flies. It kept on
        disappearing.
And though I know this has
        something to do

with lust, today it seemed
        to have to do
with work. It took it almost half
        an hour to thread
roughly ten feet of lawn,
        so slow

between the blades you couldn't see
        it move. I'd watch
its path of body in the grass go
        suddenly invisible
only to reappear a little
        further on

black knothead up, eyes on
        a butterfly.
This must be perfect progress where
        movement appears
to be a vanishing, a mending
        of the visible

by the invisible--just as we
        stitch the earth,
it seems to me, each time
        we die, going
back under, coming back up…
        It is the simplest

stitch, this going where we must,
        leaving a not
unpretty pattern by default. But going
        out of hunger
for small things--flies, words--going
        because one's body

goes. And in this disconcerting creature
        a tiny hunger,
one that won't even press
        the dandelions down,
retrieves the necessary blue-
        black dragonfly

that has just landed on a pod…
        All this to say
I 'm not afraid of them
        today, or anymore
I think. We are not, were not, ever
        wrong. Desire

is the honest work of the body,
        its engine, its wind.
It too must have its sails--wings
        in this tiny mouth, valves
in the human heart, meanings like sailboats
        setting out

over the mind. Passion is work
        that retrieves us,
lost stitches. It makes a pattern of us,
        it fastens us
to sturdier stuff
        no doubt...





"I Watched a Snake" by Jorie Graham, from Dream Of The Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994