Standing in the marsh,
worried that the black snake
may strike here.

In the city, understanding
how the black snake owns me,
shaking at the prospect of doing without.

On the road ahead of
the black snake’s fangs,
driving on nothing but poison and fear.

In the bank built of
black snake scales,
the money hissing in the vaults.

In the home of homes, here is
God above dressed in greasy robes,
black snake in his pocket.

I start a fire in the clearing
where the black snake rises and sways
just beyond the light.

A wash of calm: I realize
I can learn to eat without
the black snake, I suppose.

Starve myself a while to starve it.
The black snake starves without us
as much as we starve without the black snake.

Look: black snake bones
under the moon, white as 
a belief drained of its blood.

Listen: that’s not the black snake
hissing. Wind, perhaps. Water,
maybe. The sun, of course, is silent.

Taste and smell: no oil
on the tongue, no musk
of the black snake.

Feel the earth agreeing
with the departure of the black snake,
gone back underground now.

How clearly we can see now.
How easily we move on from this — 
upright. Not on our bellies. 

A man — call him 
Steve or, you know,
any name at all —
pulls his car, his home now
for months,

into a concealed space behind
the abandoned
machine shop where
he once worked.

Gets out to piss
on the wall between
the empty dumpsters
that somehow were never removed
after the place closed.

Stands for a minute after that
under the still-cold spring moon.

In another minute
he will spread a sleeping bag out
in his backseat.
Will use a plastic bag full of clothes
as a pillow.

By now he’s got it all down to science,

but before he starts
he thinks for minute about
a phrase that’s been in his mind
for weeks now:

the wrath of long-forbidden gods.

Shakes it off, or tries to.

Steve — if that’s his name —
has better things, more practical things
to do right now and after all,
this is America and we have
plenty of new things to worry about
without invoking old ones.

He shivers. It’s normal to shiver,
he reminds himself. It’s dark
and cold for April. You don’t 
need to imagine disinherited entities
to feel the need to shiver,
and the monstrous wings he sees
skidding across the face
of the moon tonight

must just be clouds
transformed by
his hunger and loneliness;

after all, this is America. So

he shakes it off, 
or tries to.

When you go out on the road
for the first time, whatever distance
seems too far for you to travel 
on one road without turning is precisely how long
you will have to travel before you can rest.

Even if you turn from the path
upon setting foot upon it,
you will end up having gone as far
as if you’d never changed your mind,
not even once.

You’ll be weary and all at once
the enormity of the journey will feel
mountainous upon you, a rear-view
of peaks climbed, avalanches,
near-falls, exhaustion, exaltations.

Think for a moment, though,
of the billions throughout time
who grew up simpler, constrained
but happy, who took the straight paths
allowed them — serf, cannon fodder, 

peasant, hunter, farmer — 
who ended up in the same place
you now are, resting at the end
of the road — do you think they looked back
any less amazed and overwhelmed than you?

You were so sure of yourself,
once. You followed every crazy path
you came upon and congratulated yourself
for your unique spontaneity and great fortune.
Look around. Are you alone? 

This has been the first day
of not being certain
that our future will be something other
than a hard blank wall.

We are milling about at the end
of an alley that goes nowhere,
trying to decide what to do.
Too many of us here, it seems,
to turn around and go back

without crushing millions underfoot
in the stampede. I don’t care that much
for myself as I never expected to end up
on the other side of this. But for all the rest

with no apocalypse to look forward to
and no paradise darkly looming, only
a roadblock seventeen stories high
and no way around it? Too much to bear.

Overhead, though, wings
in vast formation go back and forth
above us, too far up for us to tell
for certain whether they are albatrosses

or vultures, or even the angels 
we’ve heard so much about. 
The only thing to do: sit down
where we are and erase all the names

from all our mythologies — no more Zeus,
no more Quan Yin, no more Aphrodite,
farewell to Set and Hera and as for 
that boy Jesus…What new names

should we be learning? Here we are
sitting before the wall at the end
of the Way, trying to get the words right
if only to see what will happen.

Recalling lakefront sounds
of slow water-lapping,
slapping on docks,
slight ting of it against
aluminum boats,
and from over there
a voice and then
a screen door
shutting once, creaking
back open a touch,
then shutting for good.

Here and now, though,
there are grackles scolding
squirrels scolding
sparrows out front;
inside big kitty is snoring
as little kitty reshuffles herself
and settles on her perch.

Missing the lake now
precisely as I would miss the cats and birds
if I were at the lake.

Nowhere sounds like home
yet everywhere sounds like home.

I wonder if your true home 
is only found
in the complete absence of sound.
Would that silence hold
or would it fill
with all you’ve ever heard?