Resurrection

Kathryn Jones

August 18, 2022

Dead, dried snake lies in the dust

on a gravel road outside Santa Fe,

flattened by car wheels, stiff as old leather;

it speaks to me not with a hiss but a whisper.

I came to New Mexico to paint adobe churches,

not a desiccated serpent;

translucent skin and delicate bones curving

in a frozen “S,” the flesh lost forever.

I lay the carcass on a flat rock, take a pencil

from my bag, cover the remains with white paper,

rub soft gray lead back and forth

as I have done on my ancestors’ tombstones.

Spine and scales weave a raised pattern,

a ghost image that crawls across the page,

then drops to the ground and slithers away,

leaving its silver spirit on my hands.

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas. Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.