Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

As a child I believed everything anyone told me, as long as it was a good story. If it was something that delighted me or frightened me or seemed to have a purpose to its narrative, then I was all in. There wasn’t much of a difference between Aesop’s fable and my mother telling me about a weasel killing the chickens we kept in the backyard. All stories seemed connected and equally true. Equally important.

Up until recently, I believed what I once heard that peonies (one of my favorite flowers) actually required ants to bloom. I thought they tickled the petals open and I imagined their little feet doing the work of slowly opening those tightly packed petals until—voila—the flower was open and symbiotic relationships all made sense. But it turns out that’s not entirely true, ants do feast on the nectar of peonies, and ants do protect peonies from aphids–so the relationship is mutually beneficial, but the flowers do not require ants to open them. Now, I miss that myth. I miss it because I am always looking for examples of how species are all intertwined, how we need one another to survive in this world.

A few days ago, a friend told me that Spanish Moss, a moss I love, the way it droops down over the water oaks like mint-colored lace draping the world in a gauzy dappled light, was actually killing the trees. But, this myth is gratefully not true. We investigated further, and it turns out Spanish moss gets no nutrients from the trees, but rather takes the moisture and sunlight out of the air. It’s also not a moss. It’s a bromeliad. It’s also not Spanish, but native to the U.S. and Mexico and South America. I like that I can still love Spanish moss and can still think of those beautiful fabric-like threads floating through the canopy as benevolent. I want all the good myths to be true. Because I want to believe in wonder.

Today’s poem examines another myth in the natural world and in doing so asks what it is we believe in and why.

hoop snake
by Rebecca Wee

                     Any of several snakes, such as the mud snake, said to grasp
                     the tail in the mouth and move with a rolling, hooplike motion.
                                    —American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

the second time we met
he told me about the hoop snake

(temporal, exquisite,
a godless man

so I listened)

we weren’t sure though
if it could be true

a snake that takes its tail in its mouth,
then rolls through the world

but there are reasons to believe in god
and this seems a good one

we brought wine to the porch, spoke
of piety, marriage,

devotion assumed for reasons
that could not sustain it

while lightning took apart the sky
the fields leapt up the stream’s 

muddy lustre its sinuous length
liminal, lush, the grass black

the unheard melodies and those that catch
the leaves beginning to fret

I don’t remember now what he said his eyes
revising that dark

after he left I walked through the grass the rain
asked how do things work?

we are after something miraculous

we open our mouths we believe
we turn
at times

we gather speed

"hoop snake" by Rebecca Wee from UNCERTAIN GRACE copyright © 2001 Rebecca Wee. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.