One early summer evening a bull snake,
fat with a squirrel, slipped nonchalantly down
a cleft in the sidewalk where I worked digging
weeds; I watched his body, moving like the muscle
of man, lithe and taunt, sliding until he panicked—
perhaps drunk with the lethargy of feeding—his skin,
stretched tight as a grapefruit, locked in a skintight
hold where the cement met the wall. I snaked
my hand, slowly at first, my skin cold with panic
from the danger inscribed in the brown diamonds down
his back. Yet, as I placed my fingers on the sinewy muscle
of him, I guessed he was afraid of his mistake, digging
lazily into the blackness, assuming he digested
more than what he had, afraid in the dark, feeling skin
on skin, unable to attack with his tongue muscled
now into muteness below the sidewalk. Bull snakes,
so unlike rattlers, use their bodies to bring prey down
much more gently, circling, grabbing their panicked
victim, then squeezing until limpness replaces the panicked
frenzy of life’s desperate need to shake until all dignity
surrenders to death. I pressed my knees down
onto the calloused surface to sit with him, letting my skin
trace the coils, feel the icy links that made him snake,
trying to sooth the fear arising in his jerking muscles
as he tried to coax his body down the hole, muscling
as best he could until he stopped, exhausted. His panic
which I ignored due to my status, made me snake-like,
knowing he could not escape or attack until he digested
almost all the squirrel. I made a predator of my skin,
compelled to touch, to know, to feel what he was down
below me in the hole, letting my fingers work down
the sheet-mail of his belly, arched and white, muscle
of a being I longed to know through the tongue of my skin,
not to know like my own skin but as part of me, part of the panic
that comes when each of us--no I--bare handed, dig
and dig until so little is left of the other, there is only snake,
slithering down like fingers despite his panic, wanting the unknown
to be known, digging with so much muscle my hand coils and
the snake, desperate, inches each link of its skin from the horror of mine.
