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Beautiful Pit Viper, 2011

from Serpentine by Mark Latia

I couldn’t take my eyes off them, from the spade-shaped wedge of head to the tapered tail, and all that sinuous muscle in between. These predatory geometries made me want to stroke the snake-laden pages. As Mr. Laita writes: “Their beauty heightens the danger. The danger amplifies their beauty.”

And when we focus on their sheer, alien otherness, we feel more human — as Mr. Laita acknowledges at the end of “Serpentine,” when he quotes the poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that needs our love.”

Vogel’s Pit Viper , 2011

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