This week’s poem presents an ebulliently literary take on a seashore fight to the death – narrated by an ill-fated mollusk. In “Dying Hen-Clam, Flying Gull,” Kenneth Rosen cracks puns in Latin, riffs on French poet Baudelaire, and offers, in his own words, a “covert allegorical poetry-reading fable, seagull as reader, hen-clam as poem.” So, there’s a lot going on in this poem. But what I love most about it is simply its remarkable imagery, its overall sense of high drama, and the deliciously vivid, musical, animate voice of its bivalve narrator.

Kenneth Rosen founded-directed U.S.M.’s Stonecoast Writers’ Conference and has published many collections, from “Whole Horse” (1970) to “GOMORRAH” (2019). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and many more journals, including, most lately, online in Hole in the Head Review.

 

Dying Hen-Clam, Flying Gull

By Kenneth Rosen

 

            Hypocrite seagull, my likeness, my brother!

─Charles Baudelaire

 

            i.

Swallow my purple mind,

Seagull, make of its iodine,

As if a hen clam’s amethyst eloquence

Could satisfy and please

With its dribbles of slippery analogy,

Weeps and sighs cracked

As if words into a mirror’s luckless

Pieces, indifferently

Eyed by sea, shore and sky’s gaily

Grave jellies, like me.

 

ii.

Death is low tide’s ominous peace,

Caught napping high and dry

By a swooping seagull’s yapping

Garbled laughing, deftly

Grabbed to shatter me free of my

House and home, bald skull,

Doomed dome, easing its webbed

Talons’ grip on my bowl’s

Slobbery thoughts onto sea-slopped

Limestone rocks to wreck

 

iii.

With a thwack my love of bivalve

Paradox and cartilage hinge

In behalf of one last vast funereal,

Truly delusional silence,

An immortal instant of it, arched

Turquoise and lace

Lapping, the sea’s obedient thieves

Retreating, exposing

Tan beaches, and the likes of me:

If qua means exemplary,

 

iv.

A hen-clam is quite the hog. Wannabe

Accomplices clap

By flapping. Others reproachfully hover

Aloft, whining and crying

To protest my white-breasted assassin’s

Banquet on what once

Was me, bright eyes bracketing its

Stupidly boastful self-pity.

Where do we go from here, hypocrite

Lecteur—semblable—frere?

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Dying Hen-Clam, Flying Gull,” copyright © 2021 by Kenneth Rosen, appears by permission of the author.