Common King Snake/Ouroboros

Clearstories

24.5×24 in

Archival Inkjet Print

2017

$1,750/set unframed

Ouroboros by Naila Moreira

Weight of muscle in hand: I hold a mortal
cable woven in scale. Green veined marble,
soap-textured but in motion, convolves
on lifelines: mine straight rivers in dust,
forked as this flicked tongue.
Briefer than me
this being surely has always been here
and always will be. Its spiral hearkens
back two million centennials, underfoot
already when dinosaurs shuddered the soil
amid humid rot of primordial ferns.
It turns a crystalline lens on my face,
gilt-flecked. The pupil contracts.
Can you know me? Doubtful.
Still it’s you the sacred hieroglyph
of the great Goddess, elliptical signet
of that Queen of fertile decay,
her left-hand staff, right-hand rod of lightning.
In that shape you hold life—
you control and deal it – venom a cure
where you also lash death.
Innocent one, you
want only to return to sand, draw
your meaningless scrawls, and swallow a frog.
Sounds thrum to your skull,
frequency of a cello. In your meadow—
summer yellow, towering weeds—
prey thumps the soil, gravel shivers as claws
meet stone. Press your jaw
to ground: crescendo, it comes,
volume rising to resonant squeal, then silence.
But can you survive
outside the dynamo of our coexistence,
is our primitive partnership what’s truly real,
more than our fragments of science and schemes
trying to grasp your separate living?
We’ve obsessively catalogued 4,000 species,
each with a superpower, poison, speed, size,
too much to swallow for you or for me,
but in my hand lies your future,
in your coils mine.
With no eyelids, you cannot close
this portal, stone galaxy. Your eyes of sky
cloud only when molting, to veil
this world and its truths for just one week,
so if our sleep,
the darkness of shut-eye, is the little death
then each night, unblinded, you watch over
death in yourself and see eternity.