The snail
is a universe without a mind
and I am a mind without a place to be today
at large
in a book that I’m writing
on somewhere else—with someone else in mind.
He has
taken the morning to move between
a potted palm and me
on one foot,
stripped to the waist
like Sisyphus carrying his stone.
In an hour
or so he has made my pot plant an indoor topiary—
a thought balloon above a stunted stem
and nothing can save it now.
His work has been done a bite at a time
and like a film run in reverse—
it’s a masterpiece resolved into a doodle.
I am Issa
and feeling uninspired.
I am Bashō on a bad day rewriting Homer as haiku.
I have
sixteen syllables in hand
and a book’s worth of words boiled clean of ideas.
The snail is a godsend—today any distraction will do.
As he clips
the Yucca into a cartoon tree
and I watch his work
instead of my own,
it occurs that the snail
would just be a slug without its shell.
I test this idea on him
and he thinks on it as he kneels in his shell,
his upward looking eyes on the glory of slow things.
By the time he is done with my tree
I have uncapped my pen
but the light is poor and the nib bends as I write
into an awkward bow.
Poem
Slow Life with Inscrutable Snail
Carolyn Leach-Paholski