Snake Crossing

But not even a sign could save you.
When one of your kind tries to cross
the road — no matter how close, it seems,
you are to one side or the other —
some car seems bound to make straight
your sinewy motion, and someone,
I imagine, looks back
over his or her shoulder, as satisfied
to have gotten you as they might be
to cross some task off their to-do list,
or to fix that one thing they believed
was always wrong with their lives.

Robert Cording teaches at College of the Holy Cross, where he is the Barrett Professor of Creative Writing. He has published five collections of poems, including Common Life. He lives in Woodstock, Connecticut.