Friday Poem: "White Ground Road"

The setting for this poem is a tar-sealed road that winds through the farms and park land between Germantown and Boyds, Maryland. I was so happy to discover via Google Maps that it has not yet been developed; from a satellite view, it looks largely like it did back in 1984, when my oldest friend and I set out from my house on Schaeffer Road to journey into the wilds of Montgomery County. I long for the wild and dangerous days of our boyhoods.

White Ground Road

for Raitis

A dead black rat snake, slack like a downed power line, 
strung along our four hands and hot and thick as the tar;
I don’t remember why we decided to move it—
maybe because it seemed so clean in its skin and freshly dead, 
or because we would never hold a live one like this. 
Its crushed-open mouth still wet with bright blood 
hung by my left hand in a silent laugh.

Numb, introspective, we tossed it into the honeysuckle,
moved on, backpacks loaded with bricks,
fifty pounds of pure useless burden,
a practice hike for summer’s Boy Scout camp. 

At the five-mile mark, a creek that elbowed under 
a one-lane bridge along the crisp edge of a sod farm, we threw off
our packs, stripped, and waded in, the cool water rising around our waists.
The occasional passing farm truck was a heart-thump
over the bridge’s steel slats. Later we dressed and ate flattened 
peanut butter sandwiches on two midstream rocks.  
Mid-silence, a copperhead 

uncoiled itself from the underbrush, leaping between our faces
in a burnished blur, splashing into the creek beyond.
Stupid loose-limbed panic danced us back to the bridge,
electric fear flashing eye to eye, breathless—
the air charged with the cool, dusty smell of ozone
from the summer storm gathering itself over the hills
like a dark skirt gathering over smooth thighs.

This poem originally appeared in Parting Gifts Vol. 12, No. 2.