Gardening

In a place in the yard where nothing grows,
I lift the brick that’s nothing’s cornerstone
and unearth swarms of living dirt

passing what I thought was a moth
between them rip by rip, but it
was not, I came to see, a shared food;

it was their eggs. I found a nail and a hinge
in the mud, but no
gate. I found a hasp and a shell

and a slat. Not
feasting; reproducing. Not this;
that. Not division;

multiplication.
Not the catch; the hatch.
Ants blast downward

with the auger of cooperation
right through the single footstep
stamped like the sole

sole that so chilled Crusoe
it might as well have been cloven
by one brick

in the bed, joined by no others
in wall, path, stairway, or border,
first or last already or still

in formation, so
infested, so violently
solo, it must be the monumental

cold downed head of the framer
of some dull
concept, some pyramid

scheme, vacant slab-faced
antique statuary
whose squirming visage

faces the muck.
Worker ants craze the subterranean
emergency entrance whose surface name

is exit. Stampede, where units
are larger; trampling is the crisis
those of us with soft bodies

fear dismounting a slow escalator
that nevertheless outpaces
the interval between arriving

and arrival; one foot
on the grinder, one foot on
the landing, like being delivered

into my own body. Knowledge
and terror. Wake up, commuter,
your bottled water is throwing

beautiful spiteful rainbows all along the corridor.
Their bobbing is my radiance
and I can see forever, the crowds

and carnage of which no one
has gotten right save one location scout
who saw a day-lit mall where,

sadly patient, pressing a security gate
sacred as a choir screen,
bored, rotting, underpaid

supernumeraries
groan at the principals.
What’s more revolting?

the informed runnel of carpenter ants
that erupted through a crack in my porch
to surround a living snail—they entered the shell

and took the spiral from within like
dutiful tourists up a spire; reformation
whitewashed twists lit by an unseen source; the

narrowness of passage; and imperceptible
to me, though I listened, the swoosh
of advancing ants already climbing

a staircase to the interior that the
snail no doubt sensed, if couldn’t
hear. I saw its alien horns strain to

understand, like the ears of a dog—which—
watch my hands—lead me to
your second choice: wolf snail ravaging

common tree snail, shell and all.
There exists in nature
a wolf-kind of every species

whose criminal hunger takes the shape of
the most vile courtship; in this case,
the wolf slogs the viscid ectoplasm

of its victim; to watch it, it looks like
horrible walking, but
its lips are so elongated they are nearly

an appendage and it’s eating
the contrail of the other snail even
as it’s hunting it. Slow or fast, I can’t say.

Pursuit staged by Patience
in revenge of the abduction of her child
by Time and Silence. I watched footage

of a wolf snail on a tree
snail on a muted big-screen TV
and thought they

must be mating until one just
disappeared entirely. There’s a shill
and a shell and a shell man, sleight of hand,

a mark, and tremendous morose
marksmen from another scale, as among
us some have come from another time. The

simultaneity
sickens me. The overlaps. Wolf snail rewinding
common snail up its trembling spool,

the wheeling
of the whelk
inside the whelk.

The wave rolling
and the root we share below
the house. The wheel inside the

wheel inside the meal inside the meal of
our first date—snails you dared me with shame
of worldlessness to eat, but there was a third there—

a game statistician who’s
since left a tenuous post
to enter the system. I eat nails now,

so acute is my deficiency of iron
and men. I eat soil. I put on
my gauntlets and plod out

with rake and hoe to work the beds,
but this garden has been working me.
It took me on the long con. Who

am I, a tourist,
to buy here. Was it so long ago
I took the steep enclosed spiral

staircase up the tower
in the walled medieval stronghold
and turned into

the occlusion. Levitation
is the name gravity takes
when the hourglass

is upside down,
but the hourglass
never is. Up and down

the corkscrew
go the angels in Jacob’s vision.
Cheap revue

that plays in competition with
a cash-cum-slot machine
in the black box

lounge of the casino. Know
I am with you, Jacob heard God
whisper, and will keep you

wherever you go, and will bring you
back to this land;
for I will not leave you

until I have done
to you
what I have promised

to do.
Tourism
is the oldest industry;

dreaming is the oldest
tour. Every pilgrim has his scallop shell
to show for his. I live

in mine. Of the convergence
of the channel patterns carved
in calcium crystal, dry tributaries

that flow the half-shell to a single point,
I was told: Rejoice. You Are Not Alone, Pilgrim,
Even The Sea Maps Our Reunion On

The Very Shells It Scatters, but what
momentum
—look how the lines meet at broken

swinging muscle—
what horde pushed so
the hinge at the symbolic

intersection
of these symbolic lines in shell
the dead pilgrims followed

to their next symbolic lives
but which map just as well
the tendency of wolves

to merge packs; right now
deep in a Russian village
where they live on snow and horses,

wolves are coalescing.
I once stood by myself
in the ancient tragic scallop-shell-

shaped theater at Ephesus and saw
the flights of empty stairs
rush the stage.

The inverse
of a shooting star,
what I watched

was increments.
When my son dreams
the wolf snail

whose grave turning
has the clarity
of his grave purity

how can I tell him
it was just a dream?
I taught him

how to sleep
by putting him down
alone awake.

I taught him how
to count by starting with sheep
and staying there until

consciousness
altered the word.
A herd

eyes the narrowness
of the stile
from a great distance

but unbearable
supercolonies of ants
are not contiguous

in the human sense.
They are practical, though, and kick
up a layer of clay we form brick with

from the middle of the earth
where they are retreating in panic
with the eggs I saw them rolling

in their shining mandible
face hooks. And I dropped
the brick.