Misunderstood

The literature abounds
in accounts of unfortunates
who have heard their intractable internal
afflictions dismissed
as fancy or worse.
A shoemaker’s
“agonizing chewing in the gut”
was pooh-poohed by his wife, who had always held him
for a shirker. The doctor
prescribed a course of tonics, to scant effect.
The parson
was persuaded he was “troubled by a secret sin”
since he confessed
he had lately been subject
to certain strange and unappeasable
appetites. And when
two neighbor children
reported they had seen him through a crack
in his henhouse wall
bolting a dozen eggs, shells and all,
word of demons
flew about the town.
The sufferer,
doubled over in incessant
pain, incapable
of work or sleep, weakened, shunned, ashamed
of what even he by then half believed
to be only his own
imaginings,
eventually lost
his wits in earnest, smashed his lasts,
set his shop aflame,
and in full view of the village, turned his awl on
himself and expired.
The reader
may readily conceive
of the horror of the widow at the wake
when the final ceremonial
raising of the casket
lid disclosed
a living snake
“as thick as a man’s wrist, and twice as long
as his arm, almost,” at rest
on her husband’s breast. His cooled
flesh having become
inhospitable,
the creature
had (it was assumed)
achieved its belated egress through the puncture wound,
and was now clearly witnessed
by the congregation, lying tightly coiled,
and motionless
save for its tongue.