Christien Gholson

Christien Gholson is the author of several books of poetry, including Absence: Presence (Shanti Arts Publishing), The No One Poems (Thirty West Publishing), and All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander Press); and a novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books). Several of his chapbooks can be found online, including Tidal Flats (Mudlark) and How the World was Made (2river view). He lives in Oregon, works as a mental health counselor, and frequently engages in conversation with neighborhood crows. He can be found at: https://christiengholson.blogspot.com/

A Snake, A Root, A Shoelace: how the world was made

The moccasin created black water in order to move
secretly from one dark world to another. You know this.

I know this, too. This knowledge plays dodge and
weave in the chambers of the heart. It’s automatic, so

there’s no need to keep time. Systolic. Diastolic. Blood
moves through black water thin with a graceful lazy

motion. I close my eyes and there is the snake’s dystopic
paradise of shades, where a black-gum leaf inhales,

exhales, on the black surface, mimics the dying breath
of a swamped rowboat, black-absence of the rower

claimed by the eyes of a thousand-year-old catfish.
Everyone knows those catfish eyes can blind the sun,

dissolve it through a net of dragonfly wings. When I
remember this, I go blind, too. It’s sympathetic blindness.

When I’m blind, the swamp tilts, hummocks of peat
turn upside down, the dead work their way up through

their own corpses to find the snake along the bank.
The snake that is the cypress root. The snake that is

the lace of my untied shoes, no time to tie them, racing
out the door, on a Saturday morning, in flight, afraid;

and the snake is the seam between the shadow-din of
insects never before seen, never named, and the gluttonous

sun. I make a soft sound, a cry before the first cry, before
tongue and teeth, the cry I made long before I was named.