An Old Enemy - David Bottoms - Literary Matters

Just past midnight when I walked out back to piss in the yard

I saw at my feet in a patch of moonlight

the old enemy coiled on the root of a cherry tree.

It didn’t rattle or move, and I thought it might be dead, then the fat tail twitched as a slight wind washed the root with shadows.

I backed away slowly, looking for the shovel I kept leaning against the fence.

It wasn’t there. So thinking omen, I left the snake and walked back into the house.

This morning I saw my mistake. A rope the tree trimmers left last week lay draped across the root of the cherry.

Omen? Maybe. But no mistake.

In deep memory the danger remains – the fat rope coiled and ready to strike.

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David Bottoms

David Bottoms is the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University. The author of eight books of poems, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews, his poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, Poetry, and The Paris Review, as well as in sixty anthologies and textbooks.

For twelve years the Poet Laureate of Georgia, he has received the Frederick Bock Prize and the Levinson Prize, both from Poetry magazine, an Ingram Merrill Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives with his wife and daughter in Atlanta, and his new book of poems, Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch, will be released by Copper Canyon Press in 2018.

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