Two-headed rattler

Commonweal, Sept 13, 2002 by Michael Cadnum

Two-headed rattler.

   At first you took my word for it,
   the legend rich enough
   for a child new to tales,
   and new to the truth--
   how the big one coiled along
   the glass wall, and all the smaller
   could do was raise its head
   out of the water dish, and keep from being
   flattened where the huge sleepy
   lord rounded. But there

   came a season during our
   weekend visitations,
   after the final papers were signed,
   when every time we bought a ticket you
   said we had to enter the Hall of Reptiles,
   and all those fleshy hoops

   with v-shaped heads, vipers and
   adders, were not what you wanted.
   It was the badly-halved
   you needed to see, nature's blunder.
   And when you asked each time
   how, exactly, I would intone

   the story of how mistakes
   cut the world in two,
   and how when the first
   lie was told the mouth
   that uttered it forever
   dragged the earth.