Slowly

(I always feign an indifference to poetry, because the truth is that it was my first love. I wanted to be a modern-day Sylvia Plath without the philandering husband and the oven. I wanted to be Amy Lowell. Dorothy Parker was my idol. I fell asleep at night chanting Matthew Arnold to myself. I fought with anyone who might listen that it's not "e. e. cummings" but, also legitimately, "E. E. Cummings." Too bad I don't have any talent. All I can do is admire poetry like this--honest and sharp--from afar.)


Slowly
Donna Masini

I watched a snake once, swallow a rabbit.
Fourth grade, the reptile zoo
the rabbit stiff, nose in, bits of litter stuck to its fur,

its head clenched in the wide
jaws of the snake, the snake
sucking it down its long throat.

All throat that snake—I couldn't tell
where the throat ended, the body
began. I remember the glass

case, the way that snake
took its time (all the girls, groaning, shrieking
but weren’t we amazed, fascinated,

saying we couldn’t look, but looking, weren’t we
held there, weren’t we
imagining—what were we imaging?)

Mrs. Paterson urged us to move on girls,
but we couldn’t move. It was like
watching a fern unfurl, a minute

hand move across a clock. I didn’t know why
that snake didn’t choke, the rabbit never
moved, how the jaws kept opening

wider, sucking it down, just so
I am taking this in, slowly,
taking it into my body:

this grief. How slow
the body is to realize.
You are never coming back.