From the outside, the Serpent well is a tower
With seven stories, one for each energy center.
He tells Muse, “I’ve been lowering
My bucket into the hole, wishing for words.
My worst sin was cutting a word
In half to see if the separate syllables
Could live. They died.” The Serpent is glad
Muse is here. Having utterly depended
On the earthly world for so long, where
The black and white checkered floor of each story
Is endless, he no longer wants to be a feeling
Of God trying to think.
The Serpent is suffering, is even
Shaped like a line, ending without an end.
He stands in the basement
With a dirt floor,
One eye a cloud,
The other the well. And the third the glisten
In the hole. Don’t be afraid of pulling up a bucket
Of moonlight that’ll show
His body against the ink’s night;
There’s nowhere to hide a gun
From the sun’s transfigured face.
It spills over the circled edge
Before he cups his hands in to drink
His own scaled, liquid reflection from
The diamond between his eyes.
The rope tied to the handle stretches
As high as the top of the ink. He’s surrounded
By the tunnel-shaped brick wall of the well.
The ground only part way up. He’s down there
Holding the sky up to the blue. The stars suspended
In his hands, separated by space,
Are swimming to the surface where the tide
Will leave them as fish, beached.
One of the bricks in the well wall is missing,
And from the window, Muse watches her Serpent-
Reflection from a million rainbow doors.
