Why do this when I want nothing?
Why give living gifts I must feed?

See them, in the clear jug, in water,
climbed on a flat rock stung with lichen
and strewn with dehydrated shrimp
so tiny in life as to slip through the eye
of a needle, tinier in death – and ignored. 

They see each other and in each other
themselves, duplicated colorations
and striations of yellow green, shells
without variation, crowded with geometries—

This one on top of his southbound friend
faces north, head over tail,
a Dr. Zeuss stack – almost.  Almost
a two-headed one, but not.

Look at them, at their patience
with proximity, with confinement
as elliptical as orbits
in this fat and vast universe—

even with turtles, the pull of land
and push of water written a long time ago
on the underpinnings of being,

there is an idea of freedom,
an exercise of legs, a stretching of necks,
a sense of somewhere other.