Copperhead Guillotine (Sandy)

Dear Sandy,
° I’m haunted, through and through.
° My coffee scum this morning displayed a Wolf, a Fish, a Serpent. So far so good. A clear lookback to the Etruscan Medusa foto.

° But after dinner, just after I’d fed the fish in the Day Garden Pool, something leapt into the water from just in front of my feet.
° Was it a frog, was it--?
° It was a threefoot copperhead, with one of the New White Goldfish onethird down its gorge.
° Well you know what my reaction was.
° Yes, that Murky Turt hadn’t eaten a single one of the New Whites, they’d just been taking turns hiding under the lilypads.

° And then what?
° What I didn’t do was run to the Storehouse for rake and cotton hoe, fish Venomous Serpent out of the bubbling murk of the sediments in Pool bottom, hold him steady with the rake, and commit French Revolution 101 upon his head with the sharp little guillotine.
° And why?
° Because our Rulers in Overton have decreed it a crime and misdemeanour to murder a Venomous Reptile. Why, I purely do not know.
° ((The decree is supposed to keep down rats; yet between the cats, the hawks, the foxes and coyotes, and the roundpupilled Nonvenomous Serpents, mouseprogeny can scarcely reach breeding age hereabouts without suffering some fatal exception.))
° The why I mean I purely do not know is, I dunno who paid our Legislators to pass such a law, for without a wideopen lobbyists’ auction, our Rulers in Overton wouldn’t pass a kidney stone.

§§§§§

° I recollect D------’s attitude toward the ban on murdering redtailed hawks. To him all hawks were chicken hawks. And the moment a weasel, a chickensnake, or fox relieved his flock of so much as an eggshell, D------ was cleaning and loading his rifle.
° His argument against Governmental micromeddling?
° “Got into mah pullets.” Click, bang.

° Unimbedded, unbought, undone, Giac.

P. S. Of course, if I hadn‘t meddled with Murky Turt in the first place, that snapper‘d‘ve given Mons. Copperhead a close French bob. Naturally.