Gliding
        Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose
        that I could see—not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.
                        —Ralph Waldo Emerson

My father was suspicious
of laughter
and hated games,

gossip, music, and dancing.
And he told me—one night
when he was drinking

on our back porch
beneath a gangrenous
moon—that the dead

at his funeral home
carried themselves with
the kind of dignity he valued.

And when—
that summer—
he was diagnosed,

he quickly lost so much weight
it seemed he intended
to climb free of

the encumbrance
of the flesh,
to discard it like a snake

leaving its skin
by the wire fence where,
a week after he was gone,

I saw a black snake one morning
gliding and gliding
through the tall grass.

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Copyright © 2019 Doug Ramspeck All rights reserved
from The Louisville Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission