A Name for What isn’t There

The painting depicts a snakeskin which is empty but appears perfectly preserved like a ghostly image of a snake, in the corner of the painting is the actual snake, exiting the picture, barely visible as only the tip of the tail is still in frame. In the year of the snake, this felt like a potent image for me to explore.

Snakeskin

By Liz Beasley

Clouds thin into form: a hawk
pulling a tail of rings—beads
of an abacus, the mathematics
of light—a lengthening spine,
snakeskin no longer inhabited.
All day I’m giving a name
for what isn’t there. Yet somewhere
we’ve left our likeness, the hollow
shapes of us. Even though the snake
has slipped into the shade,
the shed skin, deceptively whole,
hidden in the sun-flecked grass,
remembers what it once held.
Source: Poetry (May 2001)