ENDGAME (after Sesshu Foster)

ENDGAME                                                            

      ...found a body republic...  —Sesshu Foster        

Finding my lost writing notes to taste,

garden snails sampled the corners of the page,

but dog-eared paper thwarts any attempts

to tame an unruly kingdom of paper.

         I think in mnemonics: Kings played chess...

What phylum of mollusc covets a taste for fingered corners

where I’d penned a temporary pledge of allegiance

to Sesshu Foster’s republic of the body?

They paid particular attention to the “p” in “pledge,”

rimming the place where I had crossed out “body” for “sex.”

But left untouched the place where I wrote:

“by which it stands, indivisible from nature.”

Maybe it’s a taste for ledges or lead, not Latinate structure,

or pickled fingerprints that attracted them.

As if in answer, they chewed on an article speculating

on chromatic emotions and cephalopod sentience,

shunning the newspaper headlines ablaze with war headlines

to calligraph another kingdom across a rugged terrain of laundry.

         while the mind toys with: ...on fine grain sand

                  We used to sprinkle salt on them,

                  & listened to the hiss and sizzle of green flame,

                  indifferent to their agony.                           

What class of sentence, what order of word

tempted snail cognoscenti to gather at the garden gate

beneath a full moon or street lamp?

What family of noun or genus of verb feeds them

as they pledge allegiance to the continuation of their species

beneath a moonlit republic of mollusk self?

9/16/03