this question she prompts me

this question she prompts me:

Do you want me to mourn?

Do you want me to wear black?

Or like moonlight on whitest sand

to use your dark, to gleam, to shimmer?

                                       Yes

                                       Tess Gallagher

Haven't I always wanted to find a lightning

whelk? And isn't there one just outside, lips

down to the mound of ground, whispering?  And
hadn't I imagined I'd find it where it really be-
longed, and on its own terms: the water it was

cauldroned in and among the witches

squeezing their tits for libations into the grin

because see? the meat's gone I mean something's

eaten it or plucked it from its knuckled grip,

something has insisted, beak or finger (do

octopi (it's not octopi is it, it's octo-

pusses) like whelk do they snuggle the shell

up to their beak and sucker it some with one

of their eight arm 240 sucker cups or even

fleecing with one of their three (it's not three?

it's two?) different hearts and innumerable beats 

to work the bellows of their gills and do they ink

a little for sweet measure and does the whelk let

go I mean let itself go because there's

a difference right, on the way something lets 

go, it's the force of what's tugging right? something
like gravity or something charismatic or something
that's just the right amount of invisible or the right
amount of getaway pressure or get away come to me baby 

pressure and the muscle either flexes or relents, right?

Am I right to say that after, and I mean long after it's all

done, the shell's left barren and bereft

of itself (the shell is bereft of itself, right?)

because here it is in New Hampshire face 

down in a garden I inherited in the winter

and this is my first spring here, and only now,

because the snow is mostly gone, have I found 

it which takes me back to my first question but

not the one I asked, it's not my question about

whelks, its the one she asks in the epigraph 

(won't you read it again) (won't you?)  or shall I

press it against your ear with my lips and the tip

of my tongue before you abandon me for once
and entirely?  But what's that you say about the lightning
whelk?  That what I found isn't lightning? That
it's knobbed?  Like knuckles coming up
from a fist?  Isn't that what you said, finally?