"Well, imagine that"

 

a lone fat snail, still in his grandad's boots, & with a twitch in both his horns
  had been going a mile a minute, pawing away
   at his neighbour's post,

 

greasing his ears with lies, two trusty ears that'd heard the lies before—    
  this snail who'd never leave without a trace,
   a sole proprietary trace

 

Ah! snail's life can be a bad one, at one moment flattening a verandah board,
  a shadow squeezed out from under his hot gut,
   & the next harassed

 

by the pernickety cat after all, after all whose shadow's greater than his gut
  But he thinks it would be great
    —the snail thinks!—

 

to lie flat on a cherry plank or slink along the grain towards a friendly ear of
  his mistress watering the azaleas
    & neighbour who digs alone

 

in his straw hat, behind the fence, content to hear more of his easy streets
  til the rooks, flustered and tail bristling,
    mistake him for a worm,

 

the hump-backed worm, and peck like mad at one then both of his silvery horns,
  snail rapt lifeless to the top of a tree,
   bitten in half

 

(a horn in one claw & another dripping from a beak,still twitching as he rose)
  hardly to be seen in a shadowless sky,
    greasy yelps unheard

 

 

A Face to a Name (5): "Alfred North Whitehead"

"Each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition." (Alfred North Whitehead)

Some reflections on Whitehead's remarkable insights into the nature of "creative advance", and its application to the poem.
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See,

"each creative act" is  some--and let's say strictly unneutral-- matter of fact,
which is never in the same place twice,

god-oriented at its best (yes, of course) with enjoyment galore
  reserved for those with an eye for concrescent moons,
                                                                                                  
  whose function, at the base of their growing, is to feed on some matter of love,
    at least thrice-halved below,

   the urge towards fullness, i.e., moon's and ours, remaining the same, at the very least,
                   and amounting to love,
                                                                                                                              
     the poet then, i.e., taking hold and seizing it (but never in the same place twice),
         unbounded by the cradling thumbs,

     the poem more gladly appetitive than speculative, in any event
         (a nexus of ants and their endearing fora)

          a sanctity of self rather than dirty remarriage,
                 to be enjoyed more than done 

"Track and field" (or some minimalist surges)

As another Track & Field season ends I reflect back on things that always distract me from my officiating duties (like neighbouring forests, birds & escarpments)
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In adjacent fields (to tantalize me!)  trails bronzing under an exposed breast of sky

A squalling light-tipped tree with chicks in its teeth--
                                                 no disc anywhere to match it for spin
                                             —
Mostly unseen in the forest, look, and lush still even when the winds pick up--
                                                 nests hanging like ribbons

At the fence, the bee's sadly unseeded who's both inside (here with me) and out there,
 ready to die sunless--
    the poor unobservable

For all it coveted was glory by the high jump bed, here with me--poor unobservable bee
  
My head up, reverentially, with both eyes hatched over in the insidious glare--
     at 50 meters geese bend like ripcord!

And just like light, wind & a leaf tossing over evenly (stem subject to resistance!)--
     dragonflies in the water pit

And down some escarpment (excluding the odd hatchling nosed out) is the mole's last jump,
    among millennia of gore