Cathedrals

Linda Kohler

You cry when your Queensland pale banded snail dies,

for the sweetness, the meekness. Impossible to tell

when its knell was wrung,

maybe before its tiny spiral was spun—

for cathedrals, daily now, are burning.

Think of the Hawaiian tree snail’s silenced song,

its body duly enshrined,

empty shell

become shrine—try not to think

of the giant Yangtze turtle, its soft shell

a cinder

alongside Notre Dame’s fire, or all the candles still lit,

but for the spire.

What does this new unsinging ask of you?

This precious spiral whose essence you’ve wrung dry?

This guilt of aiding extinction?

What atonement amid the gathering afore-

hallowed halls: the sweet tree snail, George,

and speckled turtle?

You could go to the Yangtze River.

You could find it in the Tanggula Mountains

or at dusk, in the storm drain

at the end of your street. Or when a deluge leaves mollusc slick

on a slate path, wet scutes over roofs

or mottles a stone fence,

You could notice

how the river speckles and flows, how strange and wondrous,

like the neck of a Red River turtle.

But where do dead pet rainforest snails go?

Are they logged under trees with leaf fall

as fodder for soil and chickens? Wilfully unwritten?

Squished slowly

between pages of a temperate summer

or chronicled with a forest’s emptying

song?

It doesn’t bear thinking about.

You can’t curl up in a thumbnail.

Tonight,

you may sleep in a turtle skull. You may exist

in the coils of cold giants. Never having existed

without them, you may crouch

inside their crumbling vaults.

LINDA KOHLER lives in Kaurna Country, South Australia. Her work appears in a smattering of publications, including Meniscus, The Saltbush Review, Blue Bottle Journal, and elsewhere. She can be found at lindakohler.com.