Poem by Robin Chapman
I Dream of a Two-Headed Snake
Wake to ask, what image has surfaced
this python from what archetypal ark?
Each head the head of a Siberian polar bear
striking first left, then right—then everywhere
on the dry-baked grid, fanged heads
poke up from their chessboard holes,
our task to chase each back to its lair
though nowhere is there a sign of ice
and we race, a tribe of girls, to save ourselves
and our world, though when I look up
two-headed snake in the dictionary
I find Amphisbaena alba, a white worm lizard
resistant to bites whose camouflaged tail
improves the odds of its survival by fifty percent
and then I find one in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon
musing on what odious monster I shall call her
speaking of Clytemnestra, a woman
who has slain a man—poison from both mouths—
and another Greek tale of the two-headed snakes
spawned from the blood that dripped
from Medusa’s head of hair as Perseus flew
with it over the Libyan desert,
snakes feeding on the corpses left by Cato’s army—
or the Aztec’s image of a double-headed serpent
made of turquoise, maybe a gift from Moctezuma
to Cortés, symbol of rebirth, earth and underworld
housed in the British Museum, and it's true,
in my dream, the scene suddenly switched
to a group of women telling Kundalini stories,
that energy that snakes up the spine.
Meanwhile, all those polar bears sank in the sands
of the Libyan desert, drowning in all that heat—
and now I dream I'm trying to find my husband
to tell him to come see the plays that young girls
have rewritten after Aeschylus—this time
the babies will not be dashed against the wall.
Art Information
- “Two-Headed Snake” © Hans Hillewaert; Creative Commons license.
Robin Chapman's tenth book, The Only Home We Know, was published this spring from Tebot Bach. She is the recipient of Appalachia's 2010 Poetry Prize, the Cider Press Review Editor's Prize Book Award, two Wisconsin Library Association awards, and the Posner Poetry Award for previous collections. Most recently, Six True Things, poems of growing up in the Atomic City of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, received the Wisconsin Library Association's Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ascent, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.
