DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN
If you had calcium deposits in your hands,
You had to find a preacher—
no easy feat back in the hollers
where the only churching they had was
itinerant revivalists and their tent meetings—
And have him whack the chalky little
Bubbles under the skin with a Bible.
Every summer evening at Uncle Cleo’s place, right at dusk,
out of a hole just where the garage door frame met the driveway,
a toad the size of a baseball waddled out
(way too fat and lazy to hop)
and sat—just sat—at the mouth of its cave
while human beings with jobs, social security numbers, and
generational trauma caught moths off a lamp—
some with bodies as big and hairy as house mice—
and fed them by hand to the huge yellow amphibian that
opened its obscene maw to receive the tribute,
until, at last, it turned and galumphed back down to its hall,
King Under the Mountain.
As much as my dad hated the tent revivals in the hollers,
he was scared shitless by the snake-handling church he attended
with his aunt in Grantsville—
that’s The Big City to you, son—
where the faithful passed serpents around
to see who had the Spirit and who didn’t.
People think snake-handling is a backwoods thing,
but in fact it’s something backwoods people did
to cope with the Babylonian exile of their displacement
among the citified heathens all around them,
who shut out the light of heaven like the ring of mountains
surrounding the city, where you could see a small
circle of blue when you looked straight up
in the afternoon.
Like St. Patrick’s Day parades, snake-handling allowed them to
proclaim their separateness,
exaggerating their holler-bred exoticisms
while wrapping the daily indignities of rural life in a
amnesic mist of pious longsuffering.
I spied a luna moth on a grimy tree in a
tiny front lawn off a Grantsville sidewalk,
as big as a dinner plate, slowly fanning its
green wings behind the hedge and the
genteel wrought-iron fence,
as absolutely alien as a pink flamingo.
My heart raced at the sight,
this glorified window into another dimension.
