If I had known,
as a boy,
what clams were--
If I had known
they propelled
themselves
along the ocean floor
on gelatinous feet,
buried themselves
in the sand
like so many parasitic worms,
the bugs of my nightmares,
burrowing in to me
through my ears or nose--
I'd never have been
a clam eater.
But I did not know,
then.
I would not know,
for many years,
until
it was too late,
because by then,
I'd developed a taste,
against all odds
for the crawling things
of the sea.
We chartered a boat
in Provincetown,
which took us
as I remember,
alone,
to a spit,
at low tide,
where we built castles
in the sand
and ran along the
deathly bright expanse of beach,
and Father waded out just below
the water's edge,
and we twisted our feet,
feeling for the ovoid ridge
of clam shell, and reaching down,
scooped them up and placed them
in our blue and yellow pails...
We lay in the sun
and I remember Mother
as if it were a picture:
in the Kodak color
of the late nineteen eighties,
hair cut short to her ears,
skinny even after
the recent birth of our sister,
waiting for the boys,
on a blanket
in the sun.
And when the boat
returned,
with the
lowering
tide,
it felt more than a day,
it felt a lifetime
on that sand,
under that sun,
and riding the
rise and fall
back to the cape,
we held our buckets of clams
and pockets full
of seashells and beach glass,
held tight against
the memory of that day,
receding
with the
lowering
tide.
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