A tribute to clammers
A Mess of Clams
by Robert P. Tristam Coffin
The fields are high with all the Winter’s snows
But somewhere there is cawing and glad crows,
And ice upon the bare birches feels the sun
And twinkles and is starting to run
An old, old man, with no tooth in his head
Is walking fast, and Spring is in his tread
As he wades the snowdrift of his farm,
His clam-hoe and clam-basket on his arm.
Down below him, all his bay is white,
But out towards sea the dark place overnight
Has widened, and blue waves are twinkling clear
Above the first and best clams of the year.
The March sun burns upon the man’s bent bones,
His wife is lying where the slanting stones
Are hidden by the Winter. All his sons
Are begotten and have begotten new ones.
He is alone, but he can go and bring
His mess of clams home in his eightieth Spring
As he could in his twentieth one, and he
Can pick his dinner up out of the sea
Just as well as any man alive
And think of things like young men fit to wive,
His head is high and handsome as a ram’s,
And life is good and tastes of sweet young clams.
Read in tribute to Larry Coffin at his funeral last week.
3 commentsFries With That?
I ran across this piece by Peggy Noonan the other day and meant to link to it, but other stuff came up and I forgot about it. Today I was reading Kathy Shaidle’s blog. She’d seen the column too, and the same paragraph had caught her eye:
But one senses the people who run the Times now are not so much living as re-enacting. They’re lost on the big new playing field of American media, and they’re reenacting their great moments—the Pentagon papers, the Watergate days. They’re locked in a pose: We speak truth to (bad Republican) power. Frank Rich is running around with his antiwar screeds as if it’s 1968 and he’s an idealist with a beard, as opposed to what he is, a guy who if he pierced his ears gravy would come out.
I’m not exactly sure what she means by that, except maybe that Frank Rich is a meathead.
Whatever. It made me laugh out loud. The lady can certainly turn a phrase.
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