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.
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