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The Head of the Cottonmouth

Roger Reeves

Why would I abandon the hunger-suffering

Vulture, spread-winged in the middle of the road

Eating a rabbit while it snows? Wouldn’t you

Want to touch, watch his comrades close down the sky

And, in a black circle, eat red on the white Earth?

And when the hiss of something slithers in—

Panic un-paused—wouldn’t you watch the circle

Break into black leaves pulled from the earth and flung

Into the falling sky? Wouldn’t you want to be

A servant of this paradise, not a God

In front of a screen, naked, lonely, asking—

No more a God than the crown of vultures

Frightened by a hiss that was a tire deflating?

Why would you trade Paradise for an argument

About Paradise?

Roger Reeves earned his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, and is the author of Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf Press, 2023), winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award.

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About this Poem

“This poem is part of a longer series of poems called ‘The Head of the Cottonmouth’ and ‘The Cottonmouth’s Head.’ The series started with an incident with a cottonmouth in Arkansas and the ritual of cutting off its head and burying it far away from the body. I began to think of this sort of ritual in relationship to other rituals around fear, cleanliness, disease, and the pandemic. The pandemic caused many of us to retreat behind our screens and seek validation there, distancing us from others as well as ourselves. This poem asks us to come back to ourselves, to our finitude, to our hungers.”
—Roger Reeves

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More by this poet

For Black Children at the End of the World—and the Beginning

You are in the black car burning beneath the highway
And rising above it—not as smoke

But what causes it to rise. Hey, Black Child,
You are the fire at the end of your elders’

Weeping, fire against the blur of horse, hoof,
Stick, stone, several plagues including time.

Roger Reeves

2020

Children Listen

                It turns out however that I was deeply
Mistaken about the end of the world
        	The body in flames will not be the body
In flames but just a house fire ignored
        	The black sails of that solitary burning
Boat rubbing along the legs of lovers
        	Flung into a Roman sky by a carousel
The lovers too sick in their love
        	To notice a man drenched in fire on a porch
Or a child aflame mistaken for a dog
        	Mistaken for a child running to tell of a bomb
That did not knock before it entered
        	In Gaza with its glad tidings of abundant joy  	
In Ka

Roger Reeves

2018

Past Barabbas

The funeral past and also I loved him.
And also I, him and so loved past him.
And so all funeral the past ran animal
Up to our eyes, and so, lo, I loved
Any which him, the I-him, the scandal-
Animal of him hanging his newborn
Twenty years past newborn out of a moving car,

Roger Reeves

2017

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The Head of the Cottonmouth

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