#whelks

Small aquatic cow

Mary Oliver, from a poem titled "Whelks," featured in Devotions: Selected Poems

Here are the perfect fans of the scallops, quahogs, and weedy mussels still holding their orange fruit -- and here are the whelks -- whirlwinds, each the size of a fist, but always cracked and broken -- clearly they have been traveling under the sky-blue waves for a long time. All my life I have been restless -- I have felt there is something more wonderful than gloss -- than wholeness -- than staying at home. I have not been sure what it is. But every morning on the wide shore I pass what is perfect and shining to look for the whelks, whose edges have rubbed so long against the world they have snapped and crumbled -- they have almost vanished, with the last relinquishing of their unrepeatable energy, back into everything else. When I find one I hold it in my hand, I look out over that shanking fire, I shut my eyes. Not often, but now and again there’s a moment when the heart cries aloud: yes, I am willing to be that wild darkness, that long, blue body of light.

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Knobbed and channeled whelks at Glen Echo Park in Glen Echo, Maryland

*Rasps you with my specialized radula to breach your carapace, then ejects acid into you to digest you externally*