What do we do with brilliant old damaged men?

I'm reacquainting myself with the poetry of Galway Kinnell,

Who I stupidly stopped reading

When he published "The Book of Nightmares" (1971),

But now I'm just not sure.

Tenth poem into "Strong is your hold" (2006),

Galway lights a great fire of branches

With old-garage gasoline and kerosene

And after it all burns down

He uncovers a snake huddled in the ashes,

Coiled around its (M Oliver) "one wild and precious life".

He places it in the grass and watches it

"hirple" away. I'll keep going,

But if he does this again, I'm finished with him.

I honestly don't know what to do

With these brilliant old damaged men

Who seem to have learned something precious

In the process of untangling the gordian knots

Of their traumatized lineages,

And just when they seem to be getting somewhere

They reveal that they are still winging it

(turning up the heat, ramping up the scale of the burn)

Only to find out that something precious

Was at the bottom of the whole damn pile

And I have to watch them hirple away in the grass

To write even more poems and books.

But, you know what? We don't need more nightmares

Or even more books for that matter --

We need answers!
.................

A friend of mine asked: Why isn't the burning the answer? What outcome do you need that is not being given by the image of a snake curled in the ashes of a burning branch?

I responded: The key word is his made-up word to describe the snake "hirpling" off into the grass because it is half-burned and itself wounded beyond healing repair, so I use the same word to describe how Kinnell hirples off. It wasn't an easy poem to read Tim, and it wasn't an easy poem to write. I think (this is speculation) what was really off was how he used old garage-gasoline and keroscene to light his fire, going for acceleration and scale, instead of slowing down and being present and intentional, which might have given the snake a heads-up to vacate.

I feel like this poem was really laying a trip on the reader -- me.