Oceans of Living Dirt

...little brightly colored frogs hop together in time across the forest floor while snakes watch with reptilian attention, eyes fixed on nothing somehow come around to intercept them striking out like the suspension on a low-rider, chains of brilliant scales scream poison to all who lack fangs themselves or pulse with warm blood, like the jaguar who calmly paces right through this scene along the earth packed solid by countless cloven hooves, the path resting hidden under a fern archway which viewed in profile reminds of old Roman aqueducts still standing, beneath their undersides pock-marked with empty spore cases the crushed dirt hemorrhages moss out from all edges like verdant vermicelli intestines while the mushrooms look on solemnly from fallen tree branches sinking within rot, if you could look closely, more closely than eyes can see, spores are sifting everywhere in the air, invisible snow with no respect for gravity, flowing by innumerable branches and past the canopy, pouring over the crooks of a many-ringed tree and ultimately mingling within the pinkish lungs of the jaguar panting, poised on a stone by one of the myriad rain forest streams of condensed mist, a rivulet he knows well for sometimes fish will swim riiiiight up near the surface where it gets a little shallower looking for fallen insect Icarii trapped in the surface tension, that is if they don't look up beyond the barrier of the water's elaborately twisting opaline surface as fish sometimes do to see his pair of polished irises observing them intently, pupils pointed daggers even when hunger's not such a problem, and the mind behind those retinas turning the grindstone that keeps eyes keen and ears swiveling about like jittery radio telescopes poaching signals from across the forest, a bit of static intercepted interprets as a tiny rustling sound from the underbrush that is most often only wind but sometimes means the approach of an unsuspecting hunk of self-propelled, stupid meat that begs not to be eaten until his cogent jaws encircle that enchanted place behind the skull and strike together to extract motion from it forever, excepting for the hiss and shudder at the exit of the lung's last involuntary decompression as its diaphragm relaxes for once in all its life, and you see the jaguar mind in its truest nature here:  fangs about the neck of a thrashing deer, but the cat's so steady his grasp doesn't falter a centimeter out of their interlocking oppositional confluence, eyes don't even pivot about to try and see what's going on, they peer out dead center a thousand yards out fixed on nothing in that instant because their view isn't important, even when a hoof kicks in near his belly the teeth just clamp down with rancid anger at nothing, holding on to survive the mind waits inside dueling with jaw muscles, action potentials shimmering down axons, cajoling muscular conjunctions to persevere, to turn this deer into something that dissolves into the cruel prutrifaction of the ground's decompositonal aggregations rather than prances with swift delicacy upon it, to convert it at last into flavors redolent with iron, ripples of peristalsis, the peace of satisfaction, a slightly distended stomach, and more time to drift among the pungently green leaves layered with dew and mist...