Why Adam Thorpe is Pretty Damn Cool
The Only Time I Held a Python
The only time I held a python
(thirty-foot, in Cameroon)
was by the tail: it shat
in anger, or in fear. And that
was that. Thick and wet, its body
by the human grip allowed
only to defecate
was cold, reptilian power, not hate.
Six held its length, and Charlie took
a photograph. We grin, and look
out of fashion; flared,
long hair. The serpent, where it's bared
between the tiny fists is just
cold, reptilian power, not fussed
by matters of style, the ache
of growing up, or whether to make
the right decisions. (Looking back,
I see how cameras catch my lack
of confidence, my hang-ups
as an adolescent.) The fangs
could pass right through a hand; my father
was on the head. It seemed to lather
at the lips, opened out, its tongue
volatile, thin, and tried to lunge
from the hot steadiness that kept it
from the ground. Its fear or anger leapt
uselessly and this was sad,
somehow. And that's when it dribbled, smelt bad.
-- Adam Thorpe
Adam Thorpe and Charles Simic are two of my great loves, in poetry. Thorpe in particular stands out for his willingness to delve into history, to twist the present day and the past together in his poems in very accurate and specific ways.
I love this particular poem of Thorpe's because I so often see people using animals as mirrors of particular human traits, whether in prose of poetry. Hell, I use them as mirrors and archetypes in my own writing, because they're so handy sometimes. But this constant papering over of meaning eventually obscures the truth - which is that animals are not mirrors of any human traits, because they are not human. They are themselves, in their wildness, and it is we who doubt and dither and complexify the world, we who turn them into servants or symbols. For me, the root of this poem is its illustration of two worlds where we usually think of only one, and both of them terminally unable to speak to each other.
The Guardian had a great article about Thorpe, if you're interested in reading more about him.