Snake Oil

beached fog: dory bow
 at low tide

Snake Oil— 

There’ll be a day we’ll need to come clean

with the small lies we’ve told ourselves

all this time, all our lives.  Like trimming the dead

nail that’s coming up from the thumb I shut

in the car door last March.  While something

under the nailbed is making brand

new nail, while it cut through like a tooth beneath

the bruise and immobilized blood, the old and broken

tenor to maintain a hold, like a widow

coming away from two stones and waiting

to make her own, you may say what’s she

in all this whispering about lies and their perennial

opposites, because it seems to take

as long, getting to the truth, how the nail gives way

from the bottom when it cleared the thumb tip

and begins to fray and snag

every stray string or loose something or other

and is pulled up and what’s beneath it still

attached perverts its own compromising

bruise.  It’s the shade of cooling

calves fat if you care to know, the veal

remember? we sometimes eat and leave

scraps here and there on the plate

and we’re done and good and full.  Milky.

We’re both of us lost to the crawling

we do to justify what we go through

to consume. . .oh but isn’t that just

bullshit horseshit dogshit.  But it’s true

I did jamb my thumb in the car

door, in the falling snow in the winter.

I wanted to get a picture of the way

everything seemed gentle and patient

around the weeping beech, and I’d waited

all season, and the sun was just

right and the snow was just right

and a car drove by and I was too close

and doesn’t everyone freeze

when they think they’re going to be

run over?  All those does and lambs?

All those coons?  Because look: it’s falling

snow.  It’s as stunning as it going to

get, aside from being outright

struck.  And here it is mid-June and still

I’m looking at this injury all this time

and cutting away the dead that the new

pushes up because its always done it

that way.  What else can I say, the thumb’s

doing well under the circumstances.  Her

layered lapping laths of keratin stick

out more because of the blood maybe. 

Because I’m having to trim what’s lifting

up from the middle, near that little moon,

lunula it’s called, and the nail started just

beneath what’s risen, or if it didn’t,

I’m picking it up there anyway, and it won’t

ever clear the thumb tip now, it will be

interrupted and cut off just as it’s been getting

going and making a small fuss, ready to

expose the pink nail bed beneath, to reveal

it all, whatever it is hidden under the months

of bad blood, coming clean however it can.