Four Poems | Patricia Nelson
So Many Serpentine Monsters
This thumb-wide, hissing spine
grew fatter as you slept.
A crooked line now slips
across the daylit stones
and lifts the blue light
in a swaying mouth.
Pause your thudding boots,
your bright-red, stumbling heart.
Let strangeness taste you
with its split gray tongue.
Calchas to Agamemnon
Calchas was a seer in the service of the Greek army. He predicted that the Greeks
would not win the Trojan War unless Agamemnon gave his daughter to Apollo as
a human sacrifice.
With white and hissing breath
I’ll nudge you to the story’s end.
I too will touch your murders,
slide over them before they happen
like a blind, complicit eye.
This first murder, which the gods demand,
requires both your horror and your honor—
two winds as cold and contradictory
as your unlovely gods.
But something must be excised
from the size of your war
or its correctness
for your victory to be just
as the gods imagined it.
Serpent in the Garden of Eden
Could they have done otherwise?
Temptation came upon them as
the bloom goes through a daisy.
It combed them softly with a color,
seemed to make them brighter
without changing how they know
or what they could say.
And what did it matter anyway?
How far could they go
and how much could they know?
These newly shiny things
with a large amount of innocence
and a minor love of truth.
The Recent Dead
I stand among the recent dead.
We lift our hands, hold out
our souls like small black stones.
I sense a fall, a cost.
Is this the place where
we are told that we are lost?
That the world grows
wider by our absence?
What rises from our palms
like prayer or a scent of roses?
One sadness, brief
among the longer truths.
Photo by Pravin Bagde on Unsplash
Bio: Patricia Nelson has been published fairly widely in literary journals, primarily in the USA and UK, and has been nominated for the Pushcart. She has a fifth volume of poetry, Monster Monologues, forthcoming from Fernwood Press in 2024.
