Cottonmouth Country- Poem response 21

This poem is pretty intense! First off, a cottonmouth, is a really poisonous snake, found in swamps. Also, Hatteras (which I have never heard of before) is a place on the shore of North Carolina. Cape Hatteras actually. So thoe two things help to better understand the poem. The rhyme scheme is ababcdcd. It is all one stanza. The poem is about death, clearly, with lines like "fish bones walked the waves," it just gives this image of a bunch of dead fish in the tide of the ocean floating along. So the combination of dea fish in the water, and cottonmouth snakes slithering in the grass, "An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss," gives this sense of death and danger at every turn. The author talks about how death was there on land or in the water. The author also talks about the pollution of Hatteras, and that could possibly by why there are dead fish. I don't completely understand the lines about birth being loss, but I think that it means, the child being born already lost because they are born right into this place of death. I could be wrong. I know a lot of other blogs thought it was about changes, and I could see that side as well. I like the last line about leaving a skin there, because it brings the poem back around to the title refereeing to a snakely habit. the author left a skin in Hatteras, and knows the losses she suffered?