All day we drove, eleven hours, to the crux

where my childhood, and yours, and theirs crossed—

a Sleep Inn bedded between horse farms

in the blue hills of Lexington.

In the car park, snails, zebra-striped and pearled,

scooched tiny glam ottomans across a gulch

that skidded to a creek it seemed we’d visited,

before.

Each stretched its foot (also its neck) into flesh horns

that hauled it forward, through acres of thicket

in whose dense secrecy

more snails whorled dun to emerald.

Not antennae, but tentacles, the girls told me—

eyes straining, on mucousy stilts,

as far from their shells as they could reach. 

What do we have to teach them, love? They see.