Talk about someone long enough and, as the old saying goes, they appear. Dave Bonta's "Rat Snake" starts from that coincidence and follows it somewhere much older than a backyard. Two neighbors are chatting about the snake that lives in and around a walnut tree, and one jokes about the skin it has shed. Then the snake is simply there, and the tone changes. By the end, a household nuisance has become something close to a mythic creature.
The first stanza is built to move like the animal it describes. "Crooked tunnel" is a surprising way to address a snake, since it makes the body a passage and not a thing. The next line extends the idea with "funnel your long freight." Tunnel and funnel nearly rhyme, and "freight" adds the weight and length of a train. The lines are long and mostly unpunctuated, so the reader is carried along them much as the snake is carried along the limb, which is "diminishing" as the sentence thins out toward the roof. There is no end rhyme anywhere. The poem relies on sound inside the lines, such as the f's of "funnel" and "freight," and on a speech-like looseness. The ampersand and the lack of quotation marks help here. "I don't think he's coming back for it I joked" blends the speaker's voice into the story, as it does in real conversation.
That casual register makes the turn sharper. The neighbor says "Well there he is now," and the plain phrasing lets the comedy land: the joke about absence is answered at once by presence. The next line, "And there you were son of a bitch," is half affection and half startled respect. The speaker has moved from talking about the snake ("he") to facing it directly ("you"). The snake has also stopped moving, and the long, gliding sentences give way to the short, braked phrase "still & heavy."
The central image comes next: the snake is "still & heavy as a tongue with bad news." The simile is odd and rewards slow reading. A tongue holds its news in the moment before speech, and the stillness is what makes it frightening. It also anticipates the snake's own tongue, which appears in the last line. The snake delivers no bad news. It only waits "for a signal neither of us caught," and that detail is the most unsettling in the poem. The humans have been chatting as if they were in charge of the yard, but the snake responds to cues they cannot perceive. They are being observed as much as observing.
The ending speeds up again, and the repeated "into" does the work: "back into motion into path into limbless dragon." The snake moves from motion to path, as if its body and the trail it leaves were the same thing, and then to dragon. The word "limbless" echoes the "limb" of the walnut tree from the first stanza, so the tree's branch and the snake's missing legs are joined in one small irony. A reader may also notice that "serpent," placed oddly at the end of the first stanza's opening line, has already hinted at the biblical and mythic register the poem reaches at its close.
The last image, "flicking your soft Y of flame," combines two opposites. "Soft" suggests something delicate and wet, while "flame" suggests danger. The forked tongue is drawn as a letter, a Y, which is a nice touch in a poem about messages that cannot be read. One could even hear a "why" in it, though the poem never asks the question aloud.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from so little. It has no explicit moral and no lecture about nature. It gives a joke, a glance upward, and a few seconds of stillness, and the stillness shifts the balance between the people and the animal they thought they were discussing. The poem suggests that the wild is not somewhere else. It lives in the gutter above the kitchen, and it can make us feel, briefly, like the ones being talked about.