I look out at the fields
as neat as rooms, at arbors as straight as streets,
and all is order, decency, light, life . . .
It beckons like the sirens, and we yield
tough minds to such temptation
and are lost,
for in those clumps of sedge by the pretty river
or sliding like memory into those neat barns
the viper comes, the scaly face of dreams
truer than waking, into the sunlit world.
It coils like the splotchy past, extends to a line
that slithers along the earth dividing all:
life on the one side and death on the other.
It punctuates the world with its poison umlaut . . .
We have ventured out, have we not, with our elegant hampers
for a day a la campagna , to condiment
our meal with the delights of nature: a breeze
touched with some blossom, a pattern of clouds, birdsong,
and the babble of running water (in which wine jugs
lie, waiting like sleeping mistresses).
And have we not, in prudence, beaten the grass?
Who would walk barefoot? Who would dare a nap?
The danger is there, always.

Even for us.
An instant, and civilization crumbles —
ours
as well as the shepherd's.

All of us seize sticks,
rocks . . .

That flicker of motion in the brush
and all of us are reduced to the prehistoric.
I am told of a snake that lives in Calabrian marshes.
It feeds upon fish and frogs,
but in time of drought,
when freshets fail and the sedge dries, dies,
it drags itself ashore to flail the dust
with its speckled belly. Its eyes blaze like suns
in the parched sky. Dazed, crazed by thirst
those needle eyes fix on whatever moves —
cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, men . . .