stooping
over and over, oftentimes squatting
a teenage girl some ways ahead
on the gravel lakeside trail,
fortunate finder of spilled change
but oddly, after each crouch
sidling sideways to stoop again
into the undergrowth fringing
the frisky water pestering the rocks
dozens and dozens of them
as my curiosity approached
not pieces of silver but shells
snails migrating free of hibernation
many badly crunched by April
morning cyclists and joggers
so much terrain, such paltry speed
an unfairness that disquiets
and among the caravan this saviour
when I reached a second patch
of nomads, some withdrawn inside
their spiraling, hardened tents,
shell flaps shut, but more
bent on fulfilling their biotic drive
I was unaware (the girl surely
no less) that hermaphrodite snails
prefer mates. With poky instincts –
one millimeter per second
a kilometer not under a week
hardly faster than lost coins –
snails foreplay half the day
then fire Cupid love darts
grappling hooks lashing themselves
together, perhaps lest they reconsider
ending up vulnerable and alone,
doing so nocturnally in damp habitats
seldom as exhibitionists sporting
in the glaring of a crowd
I suppose I remembered mollusks
lack skeletons or bones; pests
to a few, food to the rest
the entire world – animal
and human alike – their predator;
movement by muscular contraction;
mucus to ease the friction met
so they might crawl over a razor
unnicked; a slimy, shiny path
their notice of having humbly passed
but I knew nothing of lifting
ten times their body weight; of
toughening and repairing damaged
shells to little avail against
crushing odds; of their fighting
back after death with the parasites
they harboured; of their seeing
the earth but not hearing it
ignorant of these somehow
kindred facts, I chanced upon
a third colony of probing eyes
atop twin tentacles inching
to survive and shouldn’t have
been bemused at myself for,
out of a clear sky,
stooping