SEA SNAIL

You, like all of us, are what you conceal. Under
the iridescent palace, calcified ocean flower
or citadel that we try in vain
to simulate,
you hide, defenseless and forlorn,
artifice or worm, a mere snail
to us your executioners.

Before an ocean of hours you raise
your house of cards, your spiny fortress.
Vessel of the storm,
cradle of murmurs ever new.
Circle of night, echo, tide,
tempest where sand turns to blood.

Stripped of the armor you made, royal palace
born of your builder's genius,
you are as poor as I,
as any of us.
A weakling, you can raise
a marvelous, baffling structure.
What it preserves and hides
shall echo forever in me.

At first glance you look like the rest:
the garden slug, the land snail.
And you are as fragile as any of them.
Your strength resides
in your prodigious shell,
your obvious and recondite way
of being here on the planet.
We admire you for it and badger you. Your body
is expendable and has already been devoured.
Now we'll hold your autopsy in absentia, pester you
with a thousand impossible riddles.

Safe from the world in your internal exterior
that both reveals and shelters you,
prisoner of your shroud,
most vulnerable of all to birds of prey.
It will outlast you, provisional tenant,
your work of art finer than marble,
your moral of symmetry.

We have come to live and die.
That's what we're here for.
We'll pass on without a trace.
Except for the snail.
What millennial patience
erected its iridescent labyrinth,
horizontal tower where the blood of time
polishes labyrinths into mirrors,
seas of opaque quicksilver eternally
watching the staring of its own face.
Glimmer of twilight, static flame,
Its surface: both skeleton and entrails.

Now nothing can free you from yourself:
You dwell in the palace that you secreted.
You are it. It keeps you here,
wrapped in a perpetual shroud
bearing the imprint of your corpse.

Poor thing,
mocked and forlorn, so soft
if they rip you from the uterus
that is also your body, your face,
pretext for your invisible torment.
How you tremble with fear
at the mercy of the elements,
expelled
from the kingdom
where you were worshiped by the waves.
Once again Moctezuma meets Cortés,
come from another world, armed
by the gods of iron and fire.

Nothing is left of the occupant on the gloomy beach.
The shell, its masterpiece,
will live on a bit longer
before it , too, turns to sand.
When its echo ends
only the sea will endure,
and it has been dying since the beginning of time.
Its clamorous silence is plenitude.

Water turns back into water, sand to sand,
blood sinks into the bloody stream,
ebb and flow of words in the sea of language.
The stuff that made you unique,
but also our kin,
never again shall meet; there will never be anyone
quite like you, similar to you,
unfathomable in your solitude,
since, like all of us,
you are what you conceal.