Old fang-in-the-boot trick. Five-chambered
asp. Pit organ and puff adder. Can live
in any medium save ice. Charmed by the flute
or the first thunderstorm in spring, drowsy
heart stirs from the cistern, the hibernaculum,
the wintering den of stars. Smells like the cucumber
served chilled on chipped Blue Willow. Her garden
of clings, sugars, snaps, and strings. Her creamy breasts
we called pillows and her bird legs and fat fingers
covered with diamonds from the mines in Africa.

The smell of cucumber.... Her mystery roses....

Heading out Bandera to picnic and pick corn,
the light so expert that for miles
you can tell a turkey vulture
from a hawk by the quiver in the wing.
Born on April Fools’, died on Ground Hog’s,
he pulls over not to piss but to blow away
any diamondback unlucky enough to be
on the road between San Antonio and Cotulla.

Squinting from the back of the pickup
into chrome and sun and shotgun confection,
my five boy cousins who love me more
than all of Texas and drink my spit
from a bottle of Big Red on a regular basis
know what the bejeweled and the gun-loading
have long since forgotten. And that is:
Snakes don’t die. They just play dead. The heart
exposed to so many scrapes, bruises, burns,
and bites sheds its skin, sprouts wings and fl ies,
becomes the two-for-one sparkler on
the Fourth of July, becomes what’s slung between
azure and cornfield: the horizon.

Just three days into autumn
in this forgotten garden
the branches so beast-laden

and heavy with beast-pear
that they bow almost to the ground
offering up a be-jeweled lair

of pear-milk for the deer. Dusky
green, knobbed and knotted sugar
fists, squat, the color of an old tackle box.

Not bin perfections but good
for a hard cider or to cook down
to syrup with chicory leaves and clover

hay. Etched with the rudiments of spark and ash,
each pear a phoenix or a phoenix nest.
Listen to the earth beads in this abacus

for bees. Feel in their crowns and crests,
the steppes and grassland of the Caucasus
Mountains or the multitude of engraved

breasts of an Ephesian Artemis.
The color of an ancient thesaurus
in the back of an old country library

where a widow remembers unearthing
words from her hog butchering days 
and her vows: he was then lifted up and put

on the scaffolded table, his back feet
loosened from the bones so gambrelling
sticks could be placed through an opening.

These mottled green and hard-bottled mineral
songs, teach us the hard-truths and hurt: a hymn
to loving something so generous and good.