Rattlesnake

I found him sleepy in the heat

And dust of a gopher burrow,

Coiled in loose folds upon silence

In a pit of the noonday hillside.

I saw the wedged bulge

Of the head hard as a fist.

I remembered his delicate ways:

The mouth, a cat's mouth yawning.

I crushed him deep in dust,

And heard the loud seethe of life

In the dead beads of the tail

Fade, as wind fades

From the wild grain of the hill.

HEADLAND

The traveling sky goes landward, the blind mass

Of headland thrusts a black snout in the sea.

The indifferent violence of the working water,

The winter southwind turning the gulls, stirring