- 5.2.10 14:02
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The Box Turtle
can live for up to a hundred years.
Unless the water dries up or the land is cleared
he will spend that hundred years
in the same square-mile patch of woodland.
The voice of the turtle is never heard.
There's no sound to cloud his slow lurching waddle
inch by rickety inch over the yellowing leaves
as he searches for water.
Plated, boxed: splayed legs; sharp tail;
head red-eyed and beaked on a thick short neck.
It's hard not think of him as inside his shell,
although in fact he is his shell as much as he's not.
He can never see his own design.
Intricate tessellated bone-house spotted with profligate red,
and the soft self, thrusting out and withdrawing.
And there's no metaphor in this. No poetry.