| AMIDA TRUST | |
Poetry Dharma Transmission by Len DeLozier |
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small snake on the gravel road near the end of August. this year's crop. asleep, I said, till I saw the right eye glazed over, the left still clear. ridden over freshly by a sightless wheel, but nothing red was hanging out. I carried it away gently -- the way I carried squirming creek creatures home in mason jars when I was ten -- a procession, if you could see it, for I do this often -- and sat with it a while on the rough wood deck by the forest edge. I held the snake in my open hands and read the lifelines curving along its 9-inch length. green, like the grass where it hunted worms, and slept, warm in the sun, and black in between. it felt sacred, precious, so much of earth. its scales. its coolness. and imagine in your body how it is to move lengthwise along your spine without hands or feet and not give up. I loved it wholly for those few moments. I wonder if it knew? it was neither awake, asleep, nor dead. no darting tongue no movement in its lidless eyes no twitching tail no rising falling rising ribs no wriggle to escape. as I grew still within, attuned to the mystery whispering in my hand, I could feel the tidal current drain out along its spine in such a tiny way and taste the salt sea of our ancestral home. I laid it by the trunk of a hemlock in the garden. its spirit rode the breeze, its body held by the shaded earth it crawled from a lifetime ago, in spring. the snake was gone next day. perhaps a strong-winged raven black as night danced up to it sideways, pecked to see if it was dead, and flew with it beyond the fence. or a burly pair of garter snakes hauled it by the chakras to line another nest, the way ants with all their might drag off backwards the bits and pieces of fallen kin. or the white and yellow feral cat that lives next door, highstepping through the wet morning grass, carried it devotedly between its teeth back into the wild. we're all hand-me-downs and pass-me-ons till nothing lonely's left, and every being or thing however small that's ever lived or will, floats free and incandescent in the breathing sky sea of a summer night, dark as a snake's velvet back. deep. vast. awash with light. Len DeLozier |