Love Nips of the Boa

N O V E M B E R 1 9 9 9

LOVE NIPS OF THE BOA

by Laurence Lieberman

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Secret despoiler of herds,
he works by guile and cunning. Noiseless,
with hardly a flicker of overt motion in attack,
he starves the calves by siphoning off -- in shrewd calm,
that numbing soothe and hypnotic caress -- the milk of mothers . . .
The slithering boa glides through knotholes in pine boards, barely
rustles the dense haystack it pierces, and comes up under
the half-asleep cows to stroke their bloated udders
with gentlest forked-tongue lappings; bovine
light sleepers that might be blasted
from a lull of slumber's

trance by least skirry
of field mice brushing their forelegs
or tails, now drawn from sleep into uttermost
removes by this gentlest slurp & suction, baby calf's
touch never so rhythmic and lightly stupefying. Mother cows
cannot know how it is that they're swiftly milked, O resistlessly
depleted and robbed of their throbbing loads. Amazing it be,
so small of mass are the boas, but they can engorge
their swelled tubular length to nearly double-
thick expanse of their normal girth
with the imbibed milk,

as if they've swallowed
a whole litter of baby rabbits, coons,
or possums in a few gulps -- as well they might.
A boa's whole body is a throat. Its brain is so far
uptunnel from its tail, one end ignores the other's limits --
stuff, stuff it in: that's the only message! Then, lumbering away
like a gluttonous skunk or possum that has supped on twice
its body weight, the boa drags its overstuffed yards-
long belly, then burrows under the haystack
to hiddenly sleep off its gorged daze
of satiety . . . The farmers,

distraught by those false
milkings, freakish drainoff of prize
cows' mammaries, guess the culprits. They sweep
sharp-edged machetes through suspicious long bulges
under barnstraw, a wavering or trembling of the haypiles
as if the hay itself took breath: insucks & outflows, faint wave
motions rippling across low flat haystack is the giveaway . . .
Cutlass slashes dozing snake's milk-pouchy innards,
clipped sides twitchy like two live offspring --
but no, they're dying severed pipe lengths
stunned into a death dance.

Laurence Lieberman is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana. His poem in this issue will appear in his twelfth book, Flight From the Mother Stone,to be published next spring.