issue 24, 1999
The Eyes of the Scallops
R. A. S. 1893 - 1976
In the cold yard, my children make a home
in a cardboard box, and I have made the same
of my desk. A knife hammers the kitchen board;
the Prairie sunset turns this room to rust.
In that silver bay — the Peconic, red-bluffed —
you were channel marker or heron wading,
but from this distance, dragging the long handle,
you are a silhouette, any man…
the night
shucks its pulsing stars, opens and holds them
like the blue rows in your muddy basket,
eyes of scallops in there with our clams.
We searched the bottom with bare feet, with rakes
until the tide was at our chests, we worked
beyond this world’s vague and broken shells.
————
Author’s Statement — Though the “The Eyes of the Scallops” is an image-based elegy for my paternal grandfather, it is also an elegy for a place: the South Fork of Long Island, where I spent a great deal of my childhood. I have always been haunted by that landscape, its bays and coves (my longer poem, “Peconic”, was also in HFR), but most intensely when I was working outside of Chicago for a year. Seen underwater, scallops really do have a vivid rim of glowing sapphire “eyes” along the space where the shell-halves meet.
Ralph Sneeden’s poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Common, Ecotone, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, The Surfer's Journal, and many other magazines. The title poem from his book, Evidence of the Journey (Harmon Blunt 2007) received the Friends of Literature Prize from POETRY magazine. The title poem of his most recent book, Surface Fugue (EastOver Press, 2021) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His collection of water-related essays, The Legible Element, is forthcoming from EastOver. Born in Los Angeles, he teaches in New Hampshire at Phillips Exeter Academy.