I met the Copperhead on Laurel Ridge. He was poised
to strike when I saw him, a foot away, and froze, captured.
I thought he might be a common rat snake dressed in finery
but when I leaned in for a closer look I saw the double helix
pattern and the Shaman showed himself. He carried stones
of all the colors, interchangeable on his back. He threw them
for me and the two black ones revealed a destiny in the Cosmos
where I rested, laughing, in the bone of the Milky Way.
Sun shone on him, revealed green and gold lights slithering
at his feet. His eyes glowed like the heads of comets. I tried
to name him, even took his picture. He didn’t like my suffering
and told me to call him Chaos. He became as friendly as the
fledgling bluebirds flying around my throat. He crawled
through my mouth into my body and sent filaments out
of my fingers, into the sky. They were weaving patterns into clouds
and I saw how they turned chaos into form and the forms
whirled a sway and a dip into a waltz. Bedlam and entropy
took flight through my fingers and joined the clouds. Colors
melted into the filaments, then flowed back to my body where
they slid into my capillaries, inhabited my tissues and organs.
I looked for the shaman, but he was nowhere, even the trail
where the Copperhead had been was empty, except for a wrinkled
snake skin, off to the side, loosely coiled, two black stones
next to it. I picked them up, carefully, put them in my pocket.
