Third Snake
Up the spine,
The serpents twine
Or so they said long ago
In lands of heat and rain.
Kundalini, they call it, male and female
Rising up through the spine.
Yet some say that there is a third snake,
Both/neither,
More powerful than either,
That rises in their wake.
This I was told by the Tantrika
In tones of mystery; few know, he said,
About the third snake. That lore is gone
With only carvings on temples to let us know
What once, long ago, the yoginis knew.
The New Age music chimed behind me,
Yantras lining the walls.
And then, like a foreign visitor,
A dark face at the Swedish convention,
A pale one in the African Methodist Church,
Out of place, the Snake bumps me from behind.
You remember me. Said not in words,
But in a twist, a turn, a spiral of spine. Somehow a bit
Of humor is communicated – can a Snake have humor?
Is its life not all fish and water, stars and seaweed?
Perhaps that unseen smile is the inheritance
Of its laughing trickster father. Another turn, another twist,
That I can barely translate. But I know the gist:
That’s me they’re talking about.
And then it’s gone.
Jormundgand, what have you to do with Kundalini,
And how can you live in my sacrum when
You live in Midgard’s seas? It is a Mystery
I do not understand, and to bring it up
To the smiling Tantrika would no doubt
Make me seem mad, or at least too literal.
Are these things not symbolic? But no,
I’ve touched the Snake. It is too real,
Real as the snake between my thighs
Who I must take in hand now, as soon as I get home
And try to connect the one, somehow, to the other.
Spine/Tree
Sacrum/Root
Pelvis/Ocean
On the line
Between real and symbolic
The God/dess of Liminality lives.