You may know this one already:
"Good Bones" by Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
You could listen here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/good-bones
Snake
The thunderstorm came like a pot boiling over and the color
of water was made by that, all of a sudden, a pigment
more tropical than dense with the reflection of light.
Everywhere the scent of at least five different kinds of plants
lifted up. The desert can’t talk back but I believe
it breathes instead, breathes vivid when the water
wants it the water can’t wait and it breathes back.
I turned and went into the house.
Under the dining room table, a snake.
Green with a yellow stripe bisecting its back.
Motion ate each centimeter of floor
and air, scared, it makes sense to say, though there
exists or existed no safer time ever in which that shape
wouldn’t want to move, dead August being the exception
to this when heat makes molasses of all of us.
Why did I want to chase it out? I did, I got a rake and kept
making it make that beautiful scared
shape upon the floor, so clean.
Like two ice cubes rubbing each other
and too cold to melt. Nothing organized that fear.
Seeing the edges it found its way out.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57648/snake-56d23b5ae3965
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