From The Diary of a Snail

From The Diary of a Snail

26.08.14
Window today:
easy climbing, smooth ,
wet with rain, good traction,
but felt...high up...
Glad to get to other side.

27.08.14
Quiet day in shell, reading,
thinking and writing a little,
stopped in late.

28.08.14.
I made
delicious lettuce soup,
I read a little Spurgeon:
“Around the Wicket Gate.”
I have to agree when he says:
“Sometimes silence is better than speech.”

29.08.14.
Aching ganglia, dry radula,
sore foot , contracted.
No appetite for anything.
I felt a singular darkness grow within me.

30.08.14
Translated Hadrian’s “Animula, Vagula, Blandula”
just now. Used my own
helical verse-form.
Pleased with the result:
“My sole, my wandering foot,
Pale companion of my shell...
To what unknown garden
Will we go today
To sup sweet dew
And pass the time away?”

01.09.14.
Last night, under a hedge,
found a skull, went inside .
Thought it like a large shell.
Chewed a little of it for calcium,
very useful and tasty.

02.09.14.
Noticed new snail nearby.
Lovely neat spiral
and pretty mantle showing.
Really wanted to go over...
But too shy, too worried
about getting pregnant.

03.09.14
Rumination, lucubration,
involutional melancholy,
recursive, solipsistic.
Sometimes the path is not the way.
Sometimes the examined life
isn’t worth living.

04.09.14.
A real joy tonight:
looking back behind my shell
as I painted, with my lubrication,
an abstract in the moonlight.
Called it “Fulgence”,
signed it and left it there.

05.09.14.
Reading Grass today:
“From the Diary of a Snail”.
Disappointing,
mostly German politics.
No interesting snail facts;
but “resolute as a snail”
an excellent phrase!

06.09.14.
At the corner, a sexual encounter:
sudden, quite anonymous,
we interlocked for hours,
gripped by pleasures:
wave after wave.
Afterwards, sated,
I felt depraved... but happy!

07.09.14.
Some call me erudite,
sesquipedalian, dilatory,
living on a spiral stair
in a haunted cupola,
prey to fits, déjà vu,
and passing blackbirds.
Well, they’re right: that’s me.

08.09.14.
Wrote out my list
of favourite sayings:
“Learn to live in a spiral of uncertainty.”
“Contraction is a virtue.”
“Best foot forward, only foot.”
“Chew everything over.”
“Slow down.”

09.09.14.
Sudden dark:
stepped on, I think.
Shell broken, excruciating pain.
Dragged myself home under pot.
Last entry. For God’s sake, please
be careful where you tread.
I feel ...afraid.

Steve Bucknell. 10.09.14.