Adam Dickinson - the snake as geometry

It's not simply the garden, the machinations
of splitting such right angled thoughts.
Its body is line, but not railroad, or light,
not telephone wire or bridge.
It moves as smoke that is wilful, leaving the ash of a life
as angular as wood, curling up, each coil
a science of forgiveness; there are crosses and boxes
in the crystals of freezing, in the hardening of death,
but to move through the world is to bend, is to give.

Before straight rivers, there are oxbows.
Before the grid roads of quitting your job, moving to the city
and trying to find her,
there are the intestinal ribbons of your brain,
the twisted chromatin of sex, the lives
whose scrawled arcs before you unwind like the snaked spring
of a clock, its pendulum a crucifix of curves.