the fossil record
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The Year of the Snake is considered a lucky year.
In the Year of the Snake, I came into this world.
A bitter winter and difficult birth in New England
is how my mother told the story, and did so always,
pulling up her shoulders and bringing in her arms,
never quite shaking off the cold wind and snow.
The snake enjoys a strong, positive image in Chinese tradition.
Mother pulled the pages from Gregory's calendar,
so I moved with the saints in sacred seasons
oblivious to the Snake, Horse, Tiger, Pig—
all those Lunar beasts who also guide the world.
Mother rakes last year's irises and pulls weeds,
and I am old enough to place them in a bushel basket.
She is young and wears a garden on her printed dress.
It is my earliest memory. From the rock wall,
a garter snake enters our Eden.
I watch the forked tongue dart in and out,
and before I am afraid,
mother scoops the snake on her rake
back to the rocks.
"There." And hands me more weeds.
Indeed, the Snake is often referred to as "Little Dragon."
Spring and the woods dry and the leaves rustle
beneath my feet and rustle when I pause
and the very ground squirms before I step back
and the snakes are intertwined and no mother
and no rake in this waking from communal sleep
and taking possession of the forest floor
and I tread among them frightened
and they slither sometimes into my dreams.
A plaster Virgin looks down from the side altar,
her foot demurely crushing the serpent's head.
They awake again to the call of spring,
but I am ready, and, with the other boys
without much sin, gladly cast the first stone,
smashing the snake into a rictus that mocks
my first blood lust. I leave the wooded garden
where the dead snakes rot like old belts
that I avoid lest they cincture my guilt,
my own mark of Cain.
The Snake's element is Fire, which offers an image
of power that ascends and gives light.
Again the Year of the Snake,
but a late summer
long removed from my spring.
Candles flicker bright tongues of fire
among the shadows of a Trappist chapel
licking toward heaven.
Those born in the Year of the Snake are able to patiently
and quietly gather strength until just the right moment
to take advantage of an opportunity.
I bow with the weight of old memories
and the memory of this afternoon:
a garter snake rustling through dry grass
of an abbey meadow,
startling me in my retreat.
I would not lift a stone now,
instead,
would rather kneel with the monks
as they chant compline,
would rather live by the calendars
of both saints and creatures,
would rather welcome the snake to dreams
where Eden is a rock garden in New England
and the serpent a garter snake
spared on the tines of my mother's rake.
Lou Masson