“We are in peak iguana season,” a trapper says
with a shrug on the evening news as a way
to describe, though not really explain,
how a retiree’s pool attendant in Boca Raton
came to be shot in the calf by a pellet gun,
the worker poling a skimmer at water’s edge
as if he were a gondolier or Charon himself,
not serenading lovers on the Grand Canal
or disembarking from the banks of the River Styx,
but lifting a dead iguana from the water,
the lizard five feet long from head to tail
and held at the end of an aluminum pole
when the pellet struck the man’s right leg,
the man dropping to a knee at the lip
of the pool, the sting a snake bite,
he thought at first, until blood, red and dark
as the dead lizard’s tongue, rose from the hole
the man pressed, his body heir, it seemed,
to the rifle’s intent, its compressions of air
a kind of breath, the pellet exhaled
in the late-summer heat easy as the charge
of state to bring about these sanctioned deaths,
the quandary of beasts having no known enemies,
where into such absence someone must step.