Snail Talk For Rosemary

My invitation was lavish. I planned my words to glide as smoothly as that single leg moves across the path of discharged mucus. I imagined a kind of conversation of blue moonlight and lacy slime, moments sliding between noise and silence, blurring together. The snail appeared... Oh, the weight it must carry every where! Still with no permanent address, everywhere it rests is a homecoming. Almost immediately things broke down. The snail could not keep up, didn't want to, saw no sense in either noise or silence... Littlest one, I must scale down to your level. It is a fault of being human to always want to ascend higher and higher. I see you now, poised in a path of your own devising, half-enclosed within your tightly coiled shell, your four antennae whipping back and forth. Can those tiny, hidden eyes see me whole? For what am I really? A friendly giant who bustles and struts in the open air, bereft of home, careless of his footsteps? Or am I just an immense shadow, blocking you from every sunbeam?