the wind in the cottonwood, and the body.

Everything book: a form bound together.

This is also book: the skeleton of a rattlesnake

sheathed tightly in its unopened flesh.

Apex of spine and spur, the wet-black

curves of unlit bone, dark parentheses—letters

flexed across a mica-lit gulley, a line.

What is a page if not a lingering, an opaque

waiting—to be marked, and written?

Even the rattlesnake is legible

through the muscled strike of its body.

A sentence, or a spell, a taut rope of emotion—

serpentine signal against the surface of the eye’s

moon-stroked desert floor.

In the woods with my love, there was a snakeskin

dangling from the tree bark. Sleeve of gold, honeycombed,

scaled with light.

I touched it softly—the way I touch a line while reading—

trembling with the body of the snake before it left itself,

like leaving one word for the next—becoming, and possible.

I gave the skin to my love and said, Now I am a story—

like the snake, I am my own future.

Lines are shed like snakeskin—rubbed against

the rough white page, released. Not remembered

or unremembered. The body leaving itself for itself.

Each new line its own body, made possible

by the first body, and here now entering

the rooms of our eye and ear.

The new body is how the rattlesnake knows itself—

not as less body but as whole body.

You should never kill a rattlesnake—

a rattlesnake is also human.

Americans worship their obsessions in violent ways—

they write them down.

Americans celebrate the rattlesnake in rattlesnake rodeos—

round them up, kill them, sell them. Cash prizes

for the heaviest and longest rattlesnake, more cash

for the most dead rattlesnakes.

Rattlesnakes skinned to their tails, torsos rewritten

as italic slope, meat darkening and arched

among the almost-white prairie grasses—

the rattlesnake read and interpreted, rendered

a classic American character in a classic American font.

In my Mojave language, when you desire

the rattlesnake, you call out its first name,

Hikwiir.

You can’t know the rattlesnake’s power

if you’ve never felt its first name stretch and strike

in your mouth—like making lightning,

unfolding fangs from the soft palate of your jaw,

delivering all of it to a body you want to pull inside you:

her mouth, her throat, in your mouth and throat,

her shoulders and ribcage—

you would fold her in half if you could—

hips, such a long thigh, thigh, calves, ankles.

And afterward, you are changed,

bewildered, slow.

In the beginning, the letter N

was the image of a snake.

Phoenician scribes held it in their hands, gave it.

They deepened the body’s curve