This is Michael Carey for Voices from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s poem is "Snakeskin" by Brenda Hillman a former University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop instructor now living and teaching in Berkeley. It is a beautiful subtle poem couched in naturalistic imagery about birth and rebirth and the worlds within the world, within even ourselves that continually calls to us and, like it our not, we answer.
The Snakeskin
---And the world bent into the wide,
the field of beige and mild forevers
but the snake wanted something else;
I found its skin of stretchy diamonds
and picked it up, so I could keep
one of the two selves. The skin had eyes and the eyes
had skin, all papery before and afterward,
a little cellophane with dirt
around the rim—that’s good;
there had been time for it to be
one thing
before the world behind the world
called the snake, and the snake went –
"The Snakeskin" by Brenda Hillman from her book Bright Existence published by Wesleyan University Press. It can also be found in Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets published by Loess Hills Books of Farragut.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.
Biography
Brenda Hillman is the author of four Books of Poetry from Wesleyan University Press, White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates and Bright Existence and of two chapbooks Coffee 3 AM (Penumbra Press) and Autumn Sojourn (EM Press). She has been on the faculty at the University of Iowa; presently she teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California and lives near Berkeley with her daughter and her husband Robert Hass, the former US Poet Laureate. She has received two Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry.