You recline in the moss,
pale flesh settled in among
cool rugs of lush green,
and a small blue snail
creeps across your shoulder.
You seem at home here:
forest spirit, conifer dryad,
rooted into cypress and cedar,
spruce and yew. The sky
fills up with droplets that want
to fall, but don’t, out of respect
for the moment shared between
the snail and the snowy shelf
of your shoulder.
This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
Nice. I, too, enjoy laying in the grass. I might freak out if a snail crawled onto me.
To the snail, you are a new frontier, a landscape wondrous and strange.