Three by
Al Maginnes
Devils and Snakes
— for Emily and Jamie
There are worship places, tucked deep
in the elbows of back roads, where worshippers
raise snakes as emblems of faith.
Twisting copperheads and timber rattlers
slide from one hand to another,
but it takes trust deeper than blood
to receive a serpent from the grasp
of a stranger. Things go wrong.
A snake might strike the hand of one
who’s lifted a hundred of its kin.
More than one preacher, aflame
with temptation, has used his snakes
to be rid of an inconvenient spouse
or the husband of a woman he’s decided
he loves. The devil, after all, dwells everywhere
and snakes are only one of his handtools.
In Sunday school, the snake was our villain,
Judas’s backbone, the Snidely Whiplash
of Eden, a seductive tongue singing of
the salvations buried in flesh, in bourbon
or cocaine, paradises made to replace paradise,
pleasures grasped more readily than
eventual deliverance. A swaying girl holds
the snake’s body, her being beset by grace
as she feels it twist against her prayers,
brings its face close to hers. She would die
for the snake’s kiss. And because she would die,
the snake becomes her devil. The things
you would die for, those are your devils
and snakes. And they wait in coiled bodies
for you to know them and give them a name.
Considering Beatrice
There is no single golden Beatrice.
It takes a long time to live a full life
and each year brings its own store of regrets
and joys. Walking four blocks offers faces
fair or less than fair for you to reject
or recall forever. By the day’s end
most will have been erased to make room for
another you might consider worthy
of an epic poem. In the front porch sprawl
of final years, the old lovers come back,
unblemished as they never were in life,
but matter as much as the woman
still sleeping who never asked for a poem
but makes sandwiches just how you like them.
Mindfulness
How many times have I missed something
my daughter or wife told me or lost
the thread of some meeting because
I was wandering an endless museum
of the imagination or was wondering the name
of an oriole at the window? When
the pitcher unwound and released the ball,
I was staring down the first base line,
my swing too late and too low.
It would be a few years before I learned
the art of observing the moment. Now
that my body is a corrupt wagon
of aches and broken parts, I might
pay attention enough to hit the ball.
That chance is gone, the way something
unsayable is lost when my daughter asks
“Did you hear what I just said?” Even
if I can repeat it to her, we know I’d gone
missing from the world that is always
here, no matter where I am.
Al Maginnes has published four chapbooks and nine full length collections of poetry, most recently The Beasts That Vanish (Blue Horse Press, 2021). Recent poems appear in Lake Effect, MacGuffin, Xavier Review and American Journal of Poetry. He lives in Raleigh NC and teaches at Louisburg College in Louisburg NC.