Incredible poem...

I am currently reading Christian Wiman's book, My Bright Abyss, a slim and insightful volume substitled:  Meditation of a Modern Believer.  It is well worth the effort.  Today I came across the poem that struck deep.  It is called "Native."

At sixteen,
sixteen miles

from Abilene
(Trent,

to be exact),
hellbent

on being not
this, not that,

I drove
a steamroller

smack-dab over
a fat black snake.

Up surged a cheer
from men

so cheerless
cheers

were grunts, squints,
whisker twitches

it would take
a lunatic acuity

to see.
I saw

the fat black snake
smashed flat

as the asphalt
flattening

under all ten tons
of me,

flat as the landscape
I could see

no end of,
flat as the affect

of distant killing
vigilance

it would take a native
to know was love.