Tiger Snake
Edie Popper
She takes the shortcut to the hut, knows
this twisted forest well. She steps
over woody vines that wander round
the saplings like a kid’s lost skipping rope
or a rope-swing slung across the young
and rising canopy : :
: : The tiger snake
is the colour of rotting mulch, just another
looped root in viney scrub where new
stems coppice up from spongey logs.
The sun has left for the mountain’s western
shoulder, so she doesn’t see herself stepping
on the snake : :
: : A scratch on denim (has
she caught an orange thorn?) and the snake
flicks away like fluid. Acid splinters up
her calf and she understands—there are
no phones up here, only one other woman
a ten-minute walk away, she herself has
no car, the hospital’s an hour’s drive from
the bottom of the mountain, and the bottom
of the mountain an hour’s drive from here.
But yes, Kay has a car, and Kay had said
she was headed to her own hut for lunch, yes, she’s
probably buttering bread right now : : now a sick surge,
gut-churn but then— the possumwood & water-vine, all this
slow cool green, a geebung fruiting orange at the broad
buttress of a booyong tree as ferns itch out dots of sky & the forms
of the forest start to move, like how distance shimmers in the heat & she
feels hot, though it’s dim-damp here near the cool creek & she is hot & she
is moving (is she?) takes the shortcut to Kay’s place now the forest moves too,
reminds her how they bend, bow, breathe. how the forest, alive! & wouldn’t it
be easy if she curled possum-like by mossy tree & gossiping creek & became forest
if she could lie, live, be, forever in the forest, yes, to cede the work of breathing to
the trees—to be litter & be littered with dropped seeds where bowerbirds browse
for blue she is shadow shadow-she in shadow-forest wants to lie eyelids to the damp
(nearly does) or maybe she does & then she thinks, yes, she should go to Kay’s, yes,
she should get herself to Kay and Kay will take her down the mountain, already
she is dapple of the tallowwood & young coachwoods brush her arm to reassure her, yes,
keep walking (but is she walking through the trees, or are the trees walking past her?)
as the trees step away from her on all sides—& there’s the cabin, Kay who’s sliced
the cheese & buttered the bread & stoked a fire & found the iron jaffle-press
now she must be telling Kay what’s happened now Kay is dousing out the fire leaves
the bread behind (she’ll be hungry on the drive) & they’re in the car the clay is wet,
& the road’s had a week of rain says Kay you’re gonna talk to me until the hospital,
hey, here’s that bend where the black cockatoos roost & creak & cry,
two old door-hinges shrinking as they drive—
EDIE POPPER (they/them) is a paediatric critical care nurse and poet living on unceded Gadigal and Wangal Country. Edie hopes to add to the landscape of writing imagining worlds of planetary justice. Their writing often discusses earth, community, relationships, medicine, memory, history and class.
