Cottonmouth Country- Louise Gluck

Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras
And there were other signs
That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us
By land: among the pines
An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss
Reared in the polluted air.
Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
I know. I also left a skin there.

Louise Glück,

After rereading this poem a couple times I think Gluck is talking about dealing with negative change, which could be a death, but I think it's much bigger and broader than that. A cottonmouth it a large snake that lives in dry, barren places which paints an image for the reader. The pollution is referring to the negative changes that have spread to infect the rest of her life and how that "birth" of a change is even harder then losing something. The skin she left was referring to the cottonmouth again and how snakes shed their skins and leave parts of themselves behind to reveal the change of the new skin. This poem says so much in a way that you have to decipher and analyze which was interesting. I didn't like this poem as much as the others because I felt the writer was trying too hard to be creative and original, but it still had a good message.