The poem operates as a transcript of self-interrogation, the speaker working through a string of binary choices and arriving at a decision he could have reached without the working-through. The opening image is the poem’s governing one. A rattlesnake doing the shimmy, coaxed into a dance by something more hypnotic than itself, is an absurd enough picture to disarm the reader before the real argument begins. “A choice of one way or the other / clearly undefined” admits the dilemma’s central feature: the speaker doesn’t know which way he wants to go, and the not-knowing is the problem.

“But the real / Snake Dance is— // should I read / or write?” pivots the metaphor into the writing life. The snake’s hypnotic motion becomes the writer’s own indecision, the loop between absorbing what others have written and producing his own work. “That is my question” is the Hamlet reference delivered with a wink, and the wink is necessary because the question being asked has lower stakes than Hamlet’s but the same paralysis attached.

The beer-vodka stanza is the poem’s structural joke. The speaker offers someone else’s parallel dilemma, commodity beer or bulk vodka, and then admits the question loops back to his own. The point is not the substance choice but the looping. Whatever the addiction, whatever the indulgence, whatever the trance, the structure is the same: two options, neither chosen, the time spent oscillating rather than acting.

“Both hypnotic / but in a different / rattle / of false haze” introduces the word the poem’s closing will need. “Rattle” carries the snake’s sound and, in the closing, the writer’s. The “false haze” is the poem’s diagnosis of all the dilemmas it has named: the hypnosis isn’t real; it’s the mind’s habit of presenting itself with binary choices to delay action.

“The real hypnosis / is the Muse” arrives as the corrective. The fake hypnoses are mind’s traps; the real one is the Muse, and the real one is the only kind worth submitting to. The poem could have ended here, with the Muse named as the trance worth keeping, but it doesn’t. The dilemma reasserts itself: “Shall I dance / with the Muse’s allure of promise? / Or shimmy / with the Snake’s enticement of comfort?” The Muse is allure and promise; the Snake is enticement and comfort. The catalog has been making versions of this distinction for years (the Muse asks for risk; the world offers ease), and the choice is never as easy as the philosophical statement suggests.

The remorse-regret distinction in “If I forgo one, I feel remorse. / If I neglect the other, I feel regret” is the poem’s most precise emotional observation. The two words are usually treated as synonyms; here they are assigned to different abandoned options. The Muse abandoned produces remorse (the deeper, more permanent ache); the snake abandoned produces regret (the smaller, more recoverable kind). The speaker is calibrating which loss he can afford.

“Time is my true enemy. / Wasting away in hesitation. / Not enough commitment / for either endeavor” names the cost of the indecision. The dilemma’s price isn’t either path forgone; it’s the time spent not choosing. The poem’s wisdom is that paralysis is its own decision, and the decision is the worst one available.

The closing turn is the poem’s structural payoff. After all the oscillation, the speaker arrives at the modest verdict: “I think, / I’ll just write.” The “just” is doing real work. Writing is reduced to a small, ordinary act, and the reduction is what makes it accessible after the cosmic stakes the poem has named. “For you, my loving Muse— / maybe, / I can reach you / across the distance / with this simple / rattle of words.”

The closing rattle is the poem’s title resolution. The rattlesnake’s rattle (hypnotic, dangerous) becomes the writer’s rattle (a simple sound that might travel across the gap to the Muse). Same instrument, different intention. The snake’s rattle hypnotizes its prey; the writer’s rattle reaches across distance and asks only to be heard. The poem’s central pun is its closing gift.

A poem whose modest closing decision earns its place through the comic catalog of competing hypnoses that precede it. The structural conceit, the speaker oscillating between paired indulgences and arriving at the obvious answer only after exhausting the alternatives, is a familiar shape in the catalog, but this poem’s contribution is the rattlesnake metaphor that holds the whole structure together. The snake’s hypnotic motion is the right image for the kind of paralysis the speaker is describing: a real danger dressed up as an irresistible dance, the prey moving toward the predator because the movement is too beautiful to refuse.

The Hamlet reference embedded in “should I read / or write? / That is my question” is the poem’s funniest single beat. Hamlet’s dilemma was existential; the speaker’s is procedural. The same syntax is deployed for vastly different stakes, and the deflation is the joke. The speaker isn’t pretending his question is Shakespearean; he’s pretending Shakespeare’s syntax can be borrowed for the small daily question, and the borrowing turns out to fit because the structure of indecision is the same regardless of what’s being decided.

The remorse-regret distinction is the poem’s quietest accomplishment and one of the catalog’s most useful emotional vocabularies. Most poems treat the two words as interchangeable; this one separates them. Remorse is what you feel when you abandon the thing that mattered most; regret is what you feel when you abandon the smaller thing. By assigning the Muse to remorse and the snake to regret, the speaker is admitting which loss he can survive. The hierarchy is made explicit, and the explicitness is what makes the closing decision inevitable. He cannot afford to forgo the Muse. He can afford to forgo the snake.

“Time is my true enemy” arrives as the poem’s hardest line. After the comic catalog of dilemmas, the speaker names the actual cost: not either path forgone, but the time spent not choosing. The catalog’s broader argument about action and inaction (in “Permission Slip,” “The Door,” “The Black Chalkboard”) is here delivered in five words. Time is the enemy; hesitation is the surrender. Every minute spent oscillating between two false hypnoses is a minute the real hypnosis does not receive.

The closing rattle is the poem’s title resolution and one of the most satisfying single-word pivots in the recent catalog. The rattlesnake’s rattle has been the governing image since the first line, and the closing converts it into the writer’s rattle, a “simple rattle of words” offered across distance to the Muse. Same instrument, different purpose. The snake’s rattle hypnotizes prey; the writer’s rattle reaches. The pun is the kind of small structural achievement that justifies the entire poem in a single closing turn.

Where the poem could deepen is in the middle stretches, where the oscillation between binaries can feel like it’s running on its own steam rather than building toward the resolution. The “Mind’s hypnosis / is the only reality / false, in its promised accomplishment” passage is philosophically dense and could be its own poem, but here it’s a stop along the way rather than a destination, and the density slightly disrupts the comic rhythm the earlier stanzas establish. The poem is at its strongest when it’s funny (the rattlesnake shimmy, the beer-vodka dilemma) or when it’s plain (“Time is my true enemy”); the philosophical middle is a register it dips into but doesn’t fully commit to.

A poem that proves the question of whether to write is itself an act of not-writing, and the way out is to stop asking and start rattling.