JUST DO IT

Poem for Today - January 22, 2014

CLAMMING

I go digging for clams every two or three years

Just to keep my hand in (I usually cut it),

And whenever I do so I tell the same story: how,

At the age of four,

I was trapped by the tide as I clammed a vanishing sandbar.

It's really no story at all, but I keep telling it

(Seldom adding the end, the commonplace rescue).

It serves my small lust to be thought of as someone who's lived.

I've a war, too, to fall back on, and some years of flying,

As well as a staggering quota of drunken parties,

A wife and children; but somehow the clamming thing

Gives me an image of me that soothes my psyche

As none of the louder events — me helpless,

Alone with my sand pail,

As fate in the form of soupy Long Island Sound

Comes stalking me.

My youngest son is that age now.

He's spoiled. He's been sickly.

He's handsome and bright, affectionate and demanding.

I think of the tides when I look at him.

I'd have him alone and seagirt, poor little boy.

The self, what a brute it is. It wants, wants.

It will not let go of its even most fictional grandeur,

But must grope, grope down in the muck of its past

For some little squirting life and bring it up tenderly

To the lo and behold of death, that it may weep

And pass on the weeping, keep it all going.

Son, when you clam,

Watch out for the tides, take care of yourself,

Yet no great care,

Lest you care too much and talk too much of the caring

And bore your best friends and inhibit your children and sicken

At last into opera on somebody's sandbar.

When you clam, Son,

Clam.

© Reed Whittemore