N O V E M B E R 1 9 9 9 ![]() LOVE NIPS OF THE BOAby Laurence Lieberman | |||||||||||||
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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. Copyright © 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; November 1999; Love Nips of the Boa; Volume 284, No. 5; page 63. |
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