David Wagoner - Photographing Snakes

They’ll seem to pose for you,
though they’re always posed
in their own ulterior ways
in a steadily calm abstraction
of available light. They belong
to what they’re lying on,
looking like nothing
on earth among other things,
and they arrange themselves
with what has been rearranged
repeatedly by the wind
and the time-stopped intervals
among seasons. How they appear
when they reappear on paper
means nothing to them. They look
always their best or their least
and don’t want to be thought of
at all ahead of time
o...