I.

– bent stick in the path, ridging
the dust

where the sun
has been beating down

ten thousand hours
since last it rained

if you were a snake

I’d know
what to do
with you

tip my hat
wish you good hunting.

II.

First a red
tailed hawk
juking from
treetrunk

to tall grass

under the dark canopy

and next I, emerging, see

coyotes
flashing against the sky.

I don’t understand this world
anymore.

Image: Cylinder seal and sketch depicting Nergal, God of plague and the netherworld, circa 1800 BCE; published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images (images@wellcome.ac.uk; http://wellcomeimages.org).

Coyote pounce, by Flickr user Justin Jensen, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.