“I began to feel breathless in that withered country of time coming after time not meant to come after, and so I discovered this! And other practices like it, to put to sleep the tiger that raged in my nerves.

Why the unsatisfied tiger? I. the nerves’ jungle? Why is anything anywhere unsatisfied and raging?” – Tennessee Williams

When I lived in South America for several years I spent some time in the Amazon. Some notes I made:

The unknowable hangs like fruit from the vines next to the muddy red rivers.

Monkeys scream from tree branches in the canopy of darkness shrouding us from the light of the sun, arboreal oblivion.

Our Peruvian guide pokes at an Anaconda as if it were an earth worm in my mother’s Middle Tennessee flower garden.

A small black snake crosses my path as I trot away from my group reminding me of the very long black snake that crawled in my unscreened bedroom window as a teenager.

Fishing for Pirahna

We’d recently moved into the new, barely habitable six bedroom house two miles from our old farmhouse.

Along the thick paths of the jungle I recognize the first snake visitation was due north of my South American second smaller snake and that both came along my life path with similar metaphorical messages attached to their scaly demeanor: remember to shed what is unnecessary.

-a. h.