A hognose snake turns in oxbows around
loosestrife and sedge. It wends through sugar sand.
What do the streams and tea-dark runs hold
in the sluice and wash that flows through the pines?
Water and earth are not separate domains.
They couple like serpents, interlacing.
Powderhorn and swamp beacon spatter
the ground with gray-green and chrome yellow.
Pitcher plants, sundew, and bladderwort
become predators in the nutrient-
poor soil, using snares, enticing glue traps,
drowning pools, and siphons to pull in kill.
The string-thin bones of mice and voles pulse white
in needled patchworks of sunlight and shade.
Life and death are not separate domains.
What memory is found in the torn sack
of the snake’s shed skin? It slips through the land’s
coarse sieve, down to the aquifer’s plated
layers, a world beneath, the other world
inside this one. The demiurge’s vestibule.