Hognose Snake

If there'd been
a little more time
I would have said:
piano keys, obelisks,
yellow-brick.
After, I thought:
merry-go-round,
player piano,
conjugated verbs;
the syllables
moving faster
than the whole,
like my
whatever-it-is-
it-almost-looks-alive
question
still slowly unwinding
when the slithery-
slide-away answer
was gone.




Boelen's Python

Morelia boeleni


Steinway black.
The only accent,
color's pure absence:
short, white fence posts
strutting along the jaw line
and down the elegant edge.
Patent-leather black.
White, whiter than taffy—
marshmallow,
the whitest sock,
snow with no shadow.
Sheen on shiny
black tiles.
Water on black:
dust of forest green,
pale magenta,
rainy cobblestones.
Something you could imbibe:
whipping cream-white
and licorice-black.
The hush
before a thunder clap.
Splayed fingers falling
down on a keyboard.
Mystery under a lid.
The fullness of rests.
The empty room, full.
The silence.



A Country Called California

She would wait for spring the way
when she was ten she stood in the canyon
outside her sister's room
listening for healing's slow turn,
the winged moon caught in a five-cornered lamp
gradually pulling free.
It wasn't hopelessness, but foreshortened flight.
The slightest hint of motion or breath ringing
the hour the way the first buds of forsythia
transpose winter's white chords.
               Far away, in the land of grief,
the elder taught the younger to conjure
velvet nets of stars with wands
of sculpted sound: chattel, oleander, mahogany.
Something daring as desire; the way,
one morning, weeks after their mother's death,
a dash of yellow curry folded in an omelet
had tasted like sunlight blowing
over gold-spun mountaintops
in a country called California.

Priscilla Atkins' poems have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Epoch, The North American Review, Natural Bridge and elsewhere.  She is the arts librarian at Hope College, in Holland, Michigan.

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