Guide to Identifying Venomous Events in Utah

The past keeps changing. It's the only thing,
And it's no damned thing at all. Past's the snake
Curled up, slender as a toddler's finger,
Delicate as a Chiluly tendril

In a ball at the bottom of the stairs
Of an unfinished hotel near Zion,
Grey and perfect, ashed twig with a red tip,
Sign that it's time for a fresh Exodus,

Although the staff worker staring at it
Was just trying to figure out a way
To get the damned thing out of there without
Having to test if it was venomous.

A small man leaning on a yucca cane,

Limping by, offered a non-Biblical,

More pagan allegorical option,
Guise of fool meets trickster in wilderness

And trickster offers to help fool escape
From some perilous, absurd dilemma.
He used his cane to nudge the viper,
Who moved like wind-blown water when provoked,

Away from the stairs and out of the door.
The snake, energized to still be alive
Disappeared back into the desert scrub,
Not to be seen again. The end of that.

But the past keeps changing. The next morning,
The trickster overheard the fool boasting
To two young women about the grim snake
And how he used a stick to banish it.

Pay attention. This is where the story
Inevitably departs from story
And loses those readers baying like hounds
After narrative prey they smell as there

Once the fable itself has gone to ground
Leaving nothing behind but fools and hounds.
The trickster never deigns to curse the fools.
He makes no evil riddles of his name.

He does muse a little on the way lies
Are all we are left with once we begin
To want to get closer to the wonder
That everything we believe is a sin,

And the place that is now a finished inn,
Full of guests, children playing at the pool
Today in the open, serrated jaws
That shape the aging maw of wilderness,

Dark trees, bright red-and-white mountains, black sands,
The banded ash of the changeling hiding
Beside the emerald rattler brood in rocks
That will never do anything but fade,

Occupies the once-promising moment
When a small man and a woman made plans
To intertwine lives. The past keeps changing.
There was a story, once. Fire tailed. Ash eyed.