They later called it nyoka—serpent—
a mamba no one had seen the equal of.
They skewered it with rebar and watched it writhe.
They began with delicious nonchalance,
laying bets on who would deliver the coup de grâce.
With slingshots and bearing balls
the boys inched up the tail break by bruise,
aiming short to spark and shrapnel in the gravel.
They loved quartz smoke like some vital ingredient
in the bread of vengeance.
Elders squatted, whittling blowgun arrows,
imploring everyone to not hasten this gift,
not cheat them of their rightful portion.
That is how he found them, the pastor.
He glared about, daring anyone
to question his compassion,
as he gripped the rebar, a piece he knew stolen,
and angered more, unplanted it
and bent as if to pick up the limp body
when it struck. Men beat it to pieces.
His hand burned, he said. He sank to his knees
while they ran for the campus nurse.
That was how he died, with his snake,
a creature who spoke the only language it knew.
In Praise of the Village Idiot
Torrents of sun from mica on the hedges,
the quartz driveways framed in avocados.
Babuleo and his anklebells long overdue.
Rumour has him in a new shirt, a jungle green.
Rumour has him radiant.
It will not last, for he’s not what we want him to be.
He spies through windows, eats our garbage,
his testes dangling from torn shorts.
Someone’s sure to get him new ones
because they can’t handle his immodesty,
his seeming carelessness.
They don’t realize he knows no other way.
He sucks clay because it tastes good,
a saltiness he’s found nothing better than.
And his garbage meals shuck their ferment
to his delight—all tasting like gifts.
His anklebells sound his coming
and kids badger him where he goes.
He seethes and curses them,
their elusive ridicule, their cruel normality.
His gibberish is a longing, a palpable desire.
That he could speak such words,
find the right invective, some sweet slang.
Desire that he could just talk.
Then there are days—today perhaps—
when he finds a voice and sings,
a hollow rasping where his face speaks beauty,
blissful repose—a truce.
He makes fluent sense, a soulful parlance,
like Beethoven to his own deaf ear,
as though he’s always spoken perfectly,
never said anything else, as though he, even now,
was just wondering: Did I make music today?
The Volcanologist’s Lament
Living things know the sound of their hour.
The stormchaser knows the wind calling,
the eye’s silence before the hammerfall.
For the hellfighter, the sudden company
of fire, oil turned to tongues that lick the dust
with flame. For rockhounds the earth’s
seismic bitchings, stones tumbling from Earth’s
molten bruise. In all our hours
can one find more haunting a thrall than the dust
and shockwall closing over those calling
for help? Such images inevitably accompany
us into the grave: the fall
of lavasilk, magma’s chaotic freefall
through the sky’s strata to reclaim the earth.
A nightly pillar of fire to accompany
us, a pillar of cloud by day—what ashen hour
could pass without some stony lord calling
gravely from the depths? This sweet dust.
They say we are raised from dust.
The honey-heft of all the fruit fallen
in the orchards, the soil calling
commands of ferment and rot, the earth
reclaiming all. Everything is the hour
of his supper. We are his company,
his very wine and bread. We are a company
of fools for mistaking the holiness of dust.
Land, property, certainly. Not an hour
of these passes unbartered in the rise and fall
of markets and monies, but the earth
goes unheard. That lithic heart calling
