I have dreamed about rattlesnakes for many years, which has resulted in a sequence of poems written over those same years. I do not know why I dream about snakes or why I am fascinated by rattlers, those powerful, elusive creatures few people see in the desert. They are out there, even though their habitat has been reduced by suburban growth. As time and civilization pass through the deserts of the Southwest, fewer humans will encounter them, except in zoos or movies.

How many people who live in New Mexico, Arizona, or west Texas have recurring dreams about diamondback rattlesnakes? Do the dreams have to do with growing up in the desert and having killed rattlesnakes as a boy? Do my dreams and snake poems have to do with the myths of my ancestors, who came from northern Mexico and settled in the Sonora desert of Arizona, their houses and working environment surrounded by those elusive, unpredictable reptiles?

Rattlesnake Dream

I thought the rattlesnake was dead
and I stuck my finger in its mouth,
felt the fangs bite down,
penetrate me without letting go,
the fire removing my eyes,
replacing them with green light
of the reptile that illuminated my hand.

It entered my bone and blood,
until my whole arm was green and damp,
my wole left side turning
slick and cool as
I tried to pull it
out of my body.

I peeled my skin back
to find my veins were green
and held tightly what I believed,
what forced itself into me,
what I allowed to be given
without knowing

I would carry that secret,
crawl over the ground
become a fusion of muscle
only the sun steps on
I leaned against a huge boulder
sweated, waited, slept,
and, by morinng, found a new way
of embracing that rock,
new life in the green flesh
of the world.

This was the first snake dream in which I touched a snake. In earlier dreams, I walk across the desert and the Rio Grande River. The ground is seething with snakes, dozens of them coming out of the earth, but none bite or threaten me. I walk through the twisting, moving shapes without fear. This new version of my reptilian journey marks the first time I approached a snake to touch it.

I am standing in someone's front yard. There is an old adobe house a few yards away. A giant cottonwood tree with its huge trunk and limbs parts above my head. A dark-skinned man stands by the tree, holding a rattlesnake in his hands. I do no know him. I cannot see his face clearly. He holds the snake like an experienced snake handler. I walk up to him and see that the snake is dead. He cradles it in his arms without fear. I reach out and run my fingers over the cool, slick head of the rattler. Its eyes are closed. I carefully move a finger to the top of its head and then quickly stick my finger inside its mouth. I am not afraid. I know the mouth of the dead rattler will open for me, and it does. I push my finger deeper to feel the fangs.

Suddenly the snake comes to life and clamps down hard on my finger. But I do not scream or jump back; the snake handler does not pull the snake away. I feel a strange kind of contentment. The snake will not let me go. I am not surprised. The man disappears. The snake dangles in the air, hooked onto my hand. The dream shifts, and changes pace and scene. I am walking along the river. It is near nightfall. I wander somewhere in La Mesilla Valley, north of El Paso. The snake has entered my body through my hand and fist. It has become my arm. As I walk, I peel back the shedding skin on my left hand to expose the bright green veins and muscles of my flesh. The snake has traveled up my bones and blood to become a part of me. I keep walking along the river. My whole body is damp and cool, as if I had crawled out of the river, out of a dark place. I feel no pain, do no suffer, do not panic. This is not a nightmare. It is a trance of motion; I hear low rattling and have the sense that more snakes are about to crawl out of the ground at my feet. I keep walking along the river.
Then I wake up.

It is a peaceful awakening, but I cannot get the dream out of my mind. I think about it for several days and then write the poem. The questions return. I go through my notebooks to read earlier snake poems, trying to find a clue as to why I absorbed this snake when my earlier dreams were passive. Were my questions about rattlesnakes being answered? Did this dream take me back to my childhood, when I first encountered baby rattlesnakes? When I killed several of them, once in our neighbor's front yard, and one in a crucial encounter behind my house?

Several of my snake poems are about these killings, the only times I chanced getting bitten as a kid who played and wandered in the desert for many years. I was twelve years old when our neighbor Martha came to our door and told me there were three or four baby rattlers in her flower box. Her sons and husband were not home. She was afraid the snakes were going to get into the house or bite someone. She asked if I could take the shovel that she held in her hands and kill them for her. She thrust the long wooden handle of the shovel at me. Hesitant, I stood in the doorway.

I don't recall if my mother was home, or who else was aroumd, but I took the shovel and carefully walked back to Martha's house with her. I had seen a few snakes in the desert hills across the street and heard a few rattles in the tumbleweeds, but I had never tried to kill or confront any of them. I spotted three snakes curled around each other under one of Martha's rosebushes. They looked like thick pieces of string, each one not more than ten inches long. The baby rattlers were a pale, fleshy color with their heads almost invisible. They had not developed their rattles yet. I could see the rattle's nub at the end of their bodies.

I stood about six feet away and did not move for several seconds. I was not really afraid, but what would a twelve-year-old with a big shovel do at a moment like this? Charge and chop everything to pieces? I stood there with Martha saying, "Go on, kill them!" She backed off and waited for me to do something. The snakes moved and continued to wrap themselves around each other, becoming a single creature.

"Go on, kill them!"

I turned to look at Martha and noticed how quiet the neighborhood was in the middle of the afternoon. How did she know that I didn't go to school that day? I saw one of the snakes separate itself from the other two, and I stepped forward, using the shovel as a spear. Without aiming or pausing, I lanced the snake behind the head and watched it come apart. The two pieces split into the ground. The other snakes reacted by separating from each other. I hacked at the second one. The shovel pushed the head into the dirt. The third snake disappeared under another bush. I moved back a few feet, watching the writhing, drying snakes. I expected lots of blood but did not see any. The baby rattlers soon stopped squirming. "How many did you kill?" Martha asked me, her hands covering her mouth. She could clearly see I had gotten two. We couldn't find the third one.

I turned to her but didn't say a word. I still recall staring at her in silence. I did not know what to say as I handed her the shovel. She took it and watched me leave, the expression on my face preventing her from saying anything else to me. I cannot recall what else happened that day. That was more than twenty-six years ago. Killing the two snakes contributues to my not remembering the rest of the day, how I was able to kill the snakes with a rare bravery, a recklessness that could have gotten me bitten. My second encounter with snakes may be the crucial doorway into my drams. A couple of summers later, my mother saw four baby rattlers in our backyard. She closed the sliding doors leading to the porch and told me not to go out. She panicked and wanted to call pest control. I knew it was up to me, and I was less hesitant this time.

I used a shovel again. This time, I was more careful and noticed that the four snakes looked similar to the ones at Martha's house. I hacked at one, cutting it into pieces. I killed two more with one swing and loud thud of the shovel. Their bodies remained knotted together, their entrails streaking across the metal head of the shovel, one of the tiny snakes opening its jaws at me as it came apart in the grass. With my heart racing and sweat running down my forehead onto my eyeglasses, I looked wildly for the fourth rattler. Through the wet, distorted vision of my lenses, I saw the snake crawl up the bricks of the house to disappear into a crack in the overhanging roof. Before I knew it, it vanished into the wall of the house. My mother was going to be horrified.

I stood there and stared at the dead snakes. I couldn't take my eyes off the head of the one that died with its miniature white fangs bared to the sun and pointed at me, the jaws wide open as if to swallow my bravery completely. I could see the beautiful diamond patters starting to develop on its torn skin. I did not want to tell my mother one of the snakes had slithered into the wall. My failure was not so much in losing a snake, but in the fact that its turning toward my mothers place of safety would create resentment on her part. This only added to m shame, my sense of failure about confronting these mysterious creatures.

I dug a hole near a dry spot in the flower box and shoveled the dead snakes into it. The sweat ran down my glasses, so I couldn't see clearly what was left of the snakes. I did not stop to wipe my glasses until I covered the hole with dirt and packed it down. I wanted this mutilation to disappear into the safe ground. When I told her what happened, my mother called pest control. The man came out and said the snake would die inside the walls. He didn't think it could actually come into the house. My mother worried for several days. I remember her asking me in an anguished voice, "Why didn't you kill them all? What are we going to do with a snake loose in the house?"

Without realizing it at the time, I was consumed with guilt. I had done something terribly wrong by letting the snake get into the wall. What was a fourteen-year-old supposed to do? I was good with the shovel, but what was I doing killing snakes for other people and not completing the job, letting two of them get away? I have never forgotten the snake that rushed up the bricks to escape my attack. It could be the seed planted for my recurring dreams. Part six of my poem "Rattlesnake Dance, Coronado Hills, 1966" reads:

After killing three of them
I saw the fourth one climb up the porch,
squeeze into the bricks and disappear
into a corner of the house, its sleek body
vanishing into the wall,
becoming a part of our home.

I never saw it, again,
but lay awake at night,
knowing it was inside the house,
moving from room to room without rattling,
waiting for the walls to crumble in years,
waiting for the boy to press his hands
against the wall above his bed,
and push in the dark,
tap and push,
the silence of life
a falling black wall
that smothered every breath I took
as I waited and waited.

When I dream about snakes, there is a house nearby. I never go inside, but know it is my childhood home. It is the house the snake entered-to leave something with me-the snake I did not kill because it was quick and fast. Instinct told it where to go. Instinct saved it-and instinct shapes my snake dreams. In his book Symbols of Transformation, Carl Jung writes about snakes coming from the world of instinct, involved with the vital processes of life that are not always apparent to us. He feels snake dreams personify hidden conflicts within us. An appearance by a green snake in a dream could mean danger.
In my early dreams, there is no sense of danger, only the house somewhere in the scene. The ground is overed with snakes, hundreds of them moving between my legs as I walk peacefully along the river on a bright, sunny day. The snakes keep coming out of the ground. In one dream, they come out of a freshly dug pit. Where is my shovel?

Suddenly I am in the most recent dream. The veins and muscles in my left arm have turned green. In other dreams, I cannot identify the colors of the rattlers-there are so many snakes, the darkness of their numbers makes it impossible to recall colors. The one time I can identify a color, it becomes the green snake of danger and has entered my body.

What danger is this? As I try to relive those incidents of killing the baby rattlers, I know I overcame my fear. The harder thing to bring back is the guilt and sense of failure that I did not kill every snake that was threatening those women and the tranquility of their homes. The ones that got away inhabit my dreams. If there is a danger, it is the fact that I have been stuck in the cycle of wandering over ground covered with snakes-the desert of my lonely childhood experiences as an only son.

This sets off the recurring dreams and the snake poems that tell me that I did not finish my job as the snake killer. I sleep and go back to the snakes, but I do not kill them. I do not life shovels and tear baby rattlers apart. The snakes are alive to be a part of my dreams, even the one that pretends it is dead, so that I can come to it. The green name that is becoming my arm is consuming me in order to force me to complete the cycle and get the job done. But I do not dream killing dreams. Death is not a part of the fertile ground covered with thick diamondback rattlesnakes.

Of course, I will not go out and find a real snake, kill it, and rid myself of the baby rattlers that became grown snakes in my dreams.

Instead, I complete the cycle by writing poems, allowing myself to go back to the killings I carried out for the women. I must accept the fact that I did what I could, and let the river of living snakes flow in my dreams.

What about the green snake in my body? It is the snake that entered my house through the wall. I hacked those rattlers with a strong swing of my left arm. I am right-handed.

My conscious mind says that I was told to kill the snakes by two women who were frightened, though they must have known that snakes are a hazard of living in the desert. I cut the snakes without much hesitation. Who could ask more from a teenaged boy who had never killed snakes before? For several weeks, my mother could not get over the fact that there was a snake in the walls. I lay awake at night, listening through the walls of my bedroom to see if I could hear the rattle, find out if the snake as going to get its revenge against the young killer. Instinct tells me that I became the snake that got away. It becomes my being by traveling through my body, reaching my heart, letting me open the earth to allow newborn rattlers to emerge into the light.

If the green snake brings any other signs of danger, they point to my family and our personal history. Killing the snakes for my mother meant I was a good boy defending my home. Lettings one of them enter the house meant that I was not quite what she expected me to be. My mother eventually forgot the snake incident and life went on. I do not recall seeing snakes in our yard again. As a matter of fact, it was the last time I saw any rattlers in my twenty-five years of living in El Paso.

I started having snake dreams after I left El Paso and moved to Denver. I was gone from the desert and lived a different life. The dreams began. Distance and time, and my intense separation from the desert, triggered the release of those snakes. The dreams happen three or four times a year. They never come as nightmares. I wake up in a peaceful state and never see the dreams as signs of danger. If Jung is correct, the dreams are speaking of an unsettled killing, a flawed act of bravery, an incomplete hunt before the matriarchal audience, a family history shaped in the desert to turn out in ways I could not foresee. The Navajo believe snake dreams are not serious or threatening, unless you are bitten in the dream. When I stuck my finger into the snake's mouth, I did not feel a real bite, even though the snake took hold of me. It was a feeling of pressure, a slow evolution up my arm, a sudden, energetic flowing-an awakening within my reptilian sleep. Was it a bite? According to Navajo belief, this is the most serious dream, the one that led me to ponder this as I continue writing my snake poems.

I leave after searching each stall,
but the boa and copperhead have a long way
to go before turning blue, neither one
knowing me when I killed blue lightning
to prevent a storm of open flesh,
drove metal through muscled ground
in search of blood that never came,
my wonder over the clean pieces
sending the snake on its way
before I could enter the glass,
find the hidden blue eyes sparkling
off the wire where the rattle
misses a beat for me.

(from "The Blue Snake")

I remember the color blue when I think of the baby rattlers, never the color green from my later dream. Baby rattlers have a pale sheen. I see their quick bodies in flashes of blue "The Blue Snake" refers to a dream in which I find myself in a zoo reptile house, searching for the snakes I killed and the ones that got away.

A couple of years ago, after one of the dreams in which I walked in a swampy area near the river, the ground covered with harmless rattlesnakes, I woke and lay quietly in the dark. I thought back to killing the baby rattlers. I could still feel the sensation of snakes crawling between my legs without harming me, dozens of them sliding in and out of the river. I was not afraid, and I lay there knowing that I had not felt threatened at the age of twelve when I first killed the snakes. I was simply doing a favor for someone. The later killings helped a more immediate person and involved my house. After several of these dreams, I admitted that I was fascinated by the surviving snake crawling into the wall. I was curious as to how a snake could survive or die inside the walls. That was more important than pleasing my mother. As I lay in my bed, breathing after the latest dream, I could finally admit it to myself.

The dream of walking along the river occurred earlier than the most recent one im which the snake becomes my arm. The first dream took my fear away. The second dream made me reach out to the snakes for the first time. It was a cycle in completion, closing upon the circle like a snake devouring its own body, consuming my arm to settle within me in a startling, nonthreatening way. I accept the dream about the green snake as a sign that the baby rattler that got away grew beyond the walls of the house to be spared by fate and the actions of a boy responding to command. I had to spare the snakes. As I relive the images of hacking at them with the shovel, I know the baby rattlers were fast, but I could have killed them all. As I dream, I let some of them go-I have an inner need to not kill everything threatening the neighborhood, my mother, our house!

Native American people have a general taboo against killing snakes Tuscarora Indians are afraid to kill rattlers out of fear that the snake's relatives will retrn to seek revenge. The Tarahumara Indians of Mexico believe that the rattlers are companions of sorcerers, who meet and talk with them. Meswaki Indians believe in the rattlesnake as an instrument of punishment. The Chiricahua Apaches of Arizona have a dread of rattlers that goes beyond the fear of snakebite. They address rattlesnakes as "mother's mother" and have a restriction among their people against talking about snakes. I find this amazing for a tribe of the Sonora desert, one of the richest habitats of giant diamondback rattlers, the most poisonous of the twenty-five species of rattlesnakes in the United States.

The only other time I came close to confronting a rattlesnake was in 1986, on a hike with my poet-mentor Robert Burlingame. I was visiting my family in El Paso. Whenever I could, I would look up the wise old poet and we would take long walks in the Franklin Mountains. We were climbing back down a narrow canyon on the eastern face of the Franklins after resting at the top. He was walking in front of me and turned the corner around a huge boulder that lay in the narrow trail to the bottom. The rocks and dirt our feet rolled down warned the huge diamondback sunning itself ten yards from Robert. We stopped immediately as the powerful rattle echoed against the steep red walls of the canyon. We froze for a second, and then he pointed to it. I could not see the snake clearly because it lay under a mesquite bush, but I could make out the thick roll as it slowly coiled back, ready to strike. Robert said quietly, "It's one of the biggest I have ever seen." I didn't say anything. Without hurry or panic, we stepped back and went around the snake from several yards away. We hopped over rough mesquite and Spanish dagger cactus, then moved back onto the smooth trail cut in the avalanche of rocks. I could hear the rattle as we left the snake behind, but I did not think about the snake dreams I had already had. I was too immersed in the pleasure of good company, hiking through the desert I loved, wondering why I didn't visit often enough; I did not think about the snake until later, when the canyon encounter would result in my first snake poem, a piece I never knew would be the start of a long sequence of poems.

Diamondback on the Trail

We were climbing
down the canyon
when the sudden head
and rattle moved in the sun

We froze in awe and respect
as it turned to us,
the enormous, poised body
revealing its claim
to the desert, its reason
for waking to challenge us,
to let us stand suspended
among the cactus and red rocks

We stepped back as you said
it was one of the biggest
rattlers you had ever seen,
your years in the canyons
flashing in memory
like the snake's quick tongue
flicking at the crossing of time
and the way we all meet,
darting at the breathless way
we stumble upon the slithering heart,
the cold, slow muscle,
and the way we listen
to the loud rattling,
its blood and beauty one beat,
its bone and body
one movement into rock,
one sudden grasp at the earth.

Years and dreams later, the sudden grasp becomes the boy walking along the river, then my finger in the snake's mouth, forming itself into my arm in a cool, slow dream-a trance in which the house stands there, creatures hidden in the walls, its history of being constructed in the desert, the story of people entering their own walls, trying to find their way over the constantly moving ground.

My snake dreams will never go away. I don't know how long the snake poem sequence will be. I continue to learn more about rattlesnakes. I wonder if boys today, living in desert towns like El Paso, will encounter snakes the way I did. Now Southwest streets in the 1990s have nothing to do with the waiting desert and its inhabitants. The baby rattlers have gone underground, away from brick walls and suburbs. They rise near the river where there are no houses, no chance to mistake neighborhoods for the fresh ground of the desert, the fertile, hot soil where muscled bone rises to shake a beat for those who dream and wonder.

written by Ray Gonzalez

from "Currents from the Dancing River"
--Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry
edited by Ray Gonzalez
© 1994