Snail Dialectic
Fat tires on the truculent black truck
that never dims its headlights for me
scrunched as it growled past me this morning
well past winter salt and gravel season,
and as my flash beam slid across wet pavement
it lit up sticky masses of crushed snails,
the small brown kind whose glistering trails
make thin silver threads you barely notice
running randomly across cement benches,
like the jets’ contrails that turn blue sky
into a geometry you’ve seen all your life,
though their slashing criss-cross reminds me
every time I glance skyward of that very first
straight streaking cloud our neighborhood
gathered from screened-in porches
into the street to gaze up and marvel upon,
dead ones who were not dead yet then
but blur for me, and I only hear the timbre
of voices without words, like it seemed
this morning when I heard that scrunching
not glass or rocks, and an odd, uneasy cloud
of familiar moral quandary arose:
to go slow to try in vain to weave around them
or to vainly zoom through to shorten disgust,
for, though whatever useless choice
I made is lost, I heard again each snail’s
discreet pop noised together in one whole
grinding agony, and considering snails
I remembered how the first war jets
once boomed our neighborhoods so loud
lemonade rippled in pitchers as they left sound
behind them, leaving us in a stillness
of limp maples bereft of birdsong
and a radio’s croon muttering like a yearning,
calling us back inside our dark porches.
that never dims its headlights for me
scrunched as it growled past me this morning
well past winter salt and gravel season,
and as my flash beam slid across wet pavement
it lit up sticky masses of crushed snails,
the small brown kind whose glistering trails
make thin silver threads you barely notice
running randomly across cement benches,
like the jets’ contrails that turn blue sky
into a geometry you’ve seen all your life,
though their slashing criss-cross reminds me
every time I glance skyward of that very first
straight streaking cloud our neighborhood
gathered from screened-in porches
into the street to gaze up and marvel upon,
dead ones who were not dead yet then
but blur for me, and I only hear the timbre
of voices without words, like it seemed
this morning when I heard that scrunching
not glass or rocks, and an odd, uneasy cloud
of familiar moral quandary arose:
to go slow to try in vain to weave around them
or to vainly zoom through to shorten disgust,
for, though whatever useless choice
I made is lost, I heard again each snail’s
discreet pop noised together in one whole
grinding agony, and considering snails
I remembered how the first war jets
once boomed our neighborhoods so loud
lemonade rippled in pitchers as they left sound
behind them, leaving us in a stillness
of limp maples bereft of birdsong
and a radio’s croon muttering like a yearning,
calling us back inside our dark porches.
