Snails and Reliquaries
 by Alan Dixon
Fortune Press London 1965

The morning after rain and thunder
we walked in the hotel garden
lifting leaves of the big grasses
letting water balls roll to the roots.
Moisture had made the snails
evacuate their shells
blown their bodies out
started them walking about
under the dripping palms, the wet tables.
On the hard grass-nailbed
of the day before, we'd picked
them up-the withdrawn white ones,
some dry empty shells of eaten egg
crushing between my fingers.
You poked these headstalks with a stick
the nearest we could get to touching them;
enjoyed the way they rolled them up the way they blew them out again
the arms of grey balloons that puffed tyhemselves;
asked if they were eyes;
saw the swaying back
the well-made roof, remarked
their lack of need for houses or hotels.
But who could ever envy drouth
of the last day's thin white shells
or death and disappearance of the body in them?
They make no reliquaries for themselves
how saints would envy that! Think
if any head is strong enough
for six hundred years of stares.
Hell is where men have tried to put her
Caterina Benincasa,
not death-the final relaxation,
making the flesh die slower than it would,
protracting misery more sinister
than flagellation-
the head behind a glass
the body in another place. 

Approaching Kinship
by Mike Christensen
 
I was surprised
by a garden snail’s breech
from behind a loquat leaf
reaching for something
that was not there.
Reaching for a sky
it will never know
retreating but
only to reach out
in another direction.
 
Look I’ve found
your progeny
while I was repotting
some loquat trees
between the dirt
and furnaced clay
a cluster of
translucent eggs
so perfect in
their shape and form
you’ve lived to sing
another day.
 
There in my root-less
human haste
I dislodged them from
their earthy vine
and scattered them like
composted waste
around this garden
of mine.
  
These tiny imps
in torsion bound
whorling around
themselves, forming.
 
These atomic pearls 
curled up in slumber
contents of much, is hope.
 
I’ll never see you breech
from behind a loquat leaf
something of which
there is nothing
and still I, regret it.
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