Last summer I was walking up a trail
and caught a rattlesnake stretched 
out full length across the path
not far ahead, sunning her body 
in a shaft of light, thick branch 
fallen from the scruffy eucalyptus. 
Clearly, she was as glad as I to be 
there, diamond-shaped head 
slightly raised, to feel the warm 
sun spread to the rattle at her 
other end. I stood a long time, 
watching the patterned light 
shifting on her scales, till she 
finally disappeared into the brush. 
                        

Without its familiar guardian, the night sky
vibrates, a place of potential, winter field
where seeds wait in the dark, growing 
blindly toward a phantom light. The moon 
too, hardly visible, curled as a comma 
in its velvet-lined box of sky, wavers, 
a hint of brightness, gestating fetus 
growing a bit each day, ghost of the 
brazen body that only days before 
peered into all the windows at once, 
clawed at the shades with its sharp 
shafts of light, now locked away 
in the sky’s dark furrows, to be reborn 
each month from the same seed.
                        

We always knew when it was coming
by the smell of ozone, my father’s 
unfocused stare, as if it were a storm 
that made us run to close the windows. 
I’d rush to the cellar with a book, a 
flashlight, and a snack, plan to stay for 
hours. If I were quick enough, I’d slip out 
the door. The neighbors watched us like 
a weekly drama on TV, my father cursing, 
flailing his belt, my mother weeping, I, just 
barely out in front, feeling the sting of the 
strap on the insides of my knees. Seldom 
could we tell what dropped match had set 
the flame. But I’d always recognize the blue 
vein, bulging like a river on a map, and run.