And this is "Clamming."
I go digging for clams once every two or three
years just to keep my hand in.
I usually cut it.
And I'm sure that whenever I do so,
I tell the same story of how, at the age of four,
I was trapped by the tide as I clammed the sandbar.
It's no story at all, but I tell it and tell it.
It serves my small lust to be thought
of as someone who's lived.
Really.
I have a war, too, to fall back on, and some years of flying,
as well as a high quota of drunken parties, a wife
and children.
But somehow the clamming thing gives me
an image of me that soothes my psyche like none
of the louder events--
me helpless, alone with my sand pail
as fate in the form of soupy Long Island Sound
comes stalking me.
I have a son now at that age.
He's spoiled.
He's been sickly.
He's handsome and bright, affectionate and demanding.
I think of tides when I look at him.
I'd have him alone and seagirt, poor little boy.
The self, what a brute it is.
It wants, wants.
It will not let go of its even most fictional grandeur,
but must grope, grope down in the muck
of its past for some little squirting life
and bring it up tenderly to the lo and behold of death,
that it may weep and pass on the weeping, keep the thing going.
Son, when you clam, watch out for the tides
and take care of yourself, yet no great care,
lest you care too much and talk of the caring,
and bore your best friends, and inhibit your children,
and sicken at last into opera on somebody's sandbar.
When you clam, son, clam.
[APPLAUSE]