To My Father, and: Owning the Snake, and: To Clouds, and: Adding a Certain Ghostlike Hum to Your Inner Life Lance Larsen (bio) To My Father Exquisitely hot the August day we buried you,today eight inches of melting snow.I park where the gleaming hearse purred.I've always liked the little lanesof cemeteries, unpaved, no stop signs—byways training to become avenues,a city shrunk to a grid of grassy beds.I thought I knew exactly where you lay. Should have brought a snow shovel and boots.Still I search. Or rather trudge a feeble [End Page 66] circuit over dreamers lost in white.You call that a sign—a zebra piñata swayingfrom a tree? A turning pinwheel stuck in snow?Never mind. It feels good to tromp,feels good to have the darkening sky settlelike lost time zones in my feet. Soon, I will edge back into traffic and fishtail up the hillto the house you called home.I will not mention to Mom our tryst of duskand diminuendo, or announce I failedto find you. No, I will knock in the darkand wait for her to fumble for the switch,a ritual you lived by—wash all prodigalsin a little outside light before inviting them in. Owning the Snake Gorgeous and unnerving the way he laddered his body, all six feet of him, up to the first branch, then used the collateral of his own sinewy loops to cantilever himself higher, limb by limb,rising in the pear tree like some higher law of enmity: awe zeroing my blood, sun dropping, my daughter beside me tensing at trespass. Hadn't I nursed this oasis out of dust and thorn? Therefore, the evening. Therefore, everything in it. Then we heard chirpings, and thus tastedruin—five robin mouths aimed at the sky, and an assassin in the tree. I bolted for a hoe. [End Page 67] When I returned, the snake had gulped a pair of nestlings, my daughter waist deep in her own cries. I reached till I hooked a loop of the intruder, who hissed his ire at me.Call him Blow Snake, Hogback, Puff Adder. I pulled. He caught and draped, caught again, like an arcane argument wedged in the bones of conversation. But names fail and bodies fall. Once he hit the battered ground he hissed in earnest, filled with escape.Smash him, my daughter yelled, smash him. I held. He limped off through unmown grass, if a snake can limp, like a fallen prophet trying to part the waters. Two lives lost: true. But three saved. Or four, if you count the snake, all flash and flesh, all swimming glide,this serpent I thought I owned, taking some swallowed part of us into a darker fold. To Clouds Once upon a time, you gathered as firmament.Once upon a time, you drizzled on Hannibaland his miracle elephants. Fell, fall, will fall.Upon Cairo and Tierra de Fuego,upon Calcutta and the Antipodes, not to mentionupon my hopes for a decent weekendat the state fair. The best part of the eveningnews is watching an idiot weatherman [End Page 68] make prophesies about picnics you won't ruintomorrow. The best part of Hamlet:watching a tortured prince use youas a Rorschach blot test. Is that a camelfloating above our heads, no a weasel,no make that a whale, flukes and all.Now we are smarter. Now we pin namesthat stink of Latin to your lovely hems,try to track your intentions with oversizedballoons. In the end, I prefer lying on my backlike the next delusional and fishing your terrifyingprairies for pieces of my past. Wispy orphans,gossamer cousins, you drift in and outof my sadness. How I would like to brushmy teeth with you, or tie you in a half Windsorat my neck. Ah, oracles, ah, handbags of rain,when I dangle my feet in your Lethe,swallow the rest of me quickly. Gather upmy doubts and misdeeds and sprinkle themover the next yawning town. But firstshow me an...