The Black Snake
When the black snake
flashed onto the morning road,
and the truck could not swerve–
death, that is how it happens.
Now he lies looped and useless
as an old bicycle tire.
I stop the car
and carry him into the bushes.
He is as cool and gleaming
as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet
as a dead brother.
I leave him under the leaves
and drive on, thinking
about death: its suddenness,
its terrible weight,
its certain coming. Yet under
reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones
have always preferred.
It is the story of endless good fortune.
It says to oblivion: not me!
It is the light at the center of every cell.
It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward
happily all spring through the green leaves before
he came to the road.
Notes
How quickly does a living creature become just another thing on the road? In Mary Oliver's The Black Snake, a snake is struck by a truck, its body left motionless on the asphalt. Oliver stops to move it aside, confronting the sudden transformation of something once alive and beautiful into something already claimed by death. The encounter exposes a contradiction at the heart of existence: consciousness recognizes mortality as inevitable, yet the instinct to live remains indifferent to that knowledge. Death belongs to the universal order of nature, but every living creature persists as though its own existence were an exception. Life continues through a desire that neither understands nor requires permanence. October's decay appears in the brief distance between the snake's stillness and the life continuing around it. The road remains, the seasons turn, and Oliver drives onward, carrying the strange knowledge that everything living moves toward an ending it cannot imagine. #MaryOliver #AmericanPoetry #NaturePoetry #Existentialism #Mortality