A poem by Richard Howard (RIP)
Oystering      Â
       “Messieurs, l’huitre étoit bonne. Adieu. Vivez en paix.”       —Boileau
Secret they are, sealed, annealed, and brainless  And solitary as Dickens said, but  They have something to say: that there is more  Than one way to yield. The first—and the hardest.  The most nearly hindered—is when you pull  Them off the rocks, a stinking, sawing sedge  Sucking them back under the black mud, full  Of hermit crabs and their borrowed snailshells,  Minnows scattering like superstitions,  The surf dragging, and every power  Life permits them holding out, holding on  For dear life. Sometimes the stones give way first.  Before they will, but still we gather them,  Even if our hands are bloody as meat,  For a lunch Queen Victoria preferred:  "A barrel of Wellfleet oysters, points down"  Could last across the ocean, all the way  To Windsor, wakening a widow's taste.  We ate them this afternoon, out of their  Armor that was formidably grooved, though  It proved our own reversal wiser still:  Keep the bones and stones inside, or never Leave the sea. "He was a brave man," Swift said,  "Who first eat one." Even now, precedent  Of centuries is not always enough. Driving the knife into muscles that mould  The valves so close to being impartial.  Surrender, when it comes—and it must come:  Lavish after that first grudging release  Back there in the sea, the giving over  Of despair, this time—makes me speculate.  Like Oscar and oysters, I feel "always  Slightly immortal when in the sea": what  Happens now we are out? Is the risk worth  While for a potential pearl? No, what we're  Really after is the moment of release,  The turn and tear of the blade that tightens,  Tortures, ultimately tells. When you spread The shells, something always sticks to the wrong  One, and a few drops of liquor dribble  Into the sand. Scrape it off: in the full  Half, as well as a Fautrier, a Zen Garden, and the smell of herring brine that  Ferenczi said we remember from the womb,  Lunch is served, in shiny stoneware sockets,  Blue milk in the sea's filthiest cup. More  Easily an emblem for the inner man Than dinner, sundered, for the stomach. We  Take them queasily, wonder as we gulp When it is—then, now, tomorrow—they're dead.
Richard Howard (1929-2022)
Richard Howard died March 31st, 2022. RIP
