Oysters
Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.
Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south of Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege
And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
Seamus Heaney
Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.
Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south of Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege
And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
Seamus Heaney
posted by:
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SF Bay Area
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Re: Poetry
Mon, April 24, 2006 - 1:21 PMreading these words
were enough to make
me salivate for the taste
of the deep ocean
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Re: Poetry
Thu, April 27, 2006 - 3:37 PMA FOOTLOOSE young American named Jon Rowley sat in a down-at-the-heels room in Paris one day in the mid-1960's, reading "A Moveable Feast," Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published memoir of life in the city during the 1920's.
One passage above all seized his attention. Hemingway had written, "As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans."
At that moment, Mr. Rowley experienced a kind of epiphany that shaped not only his life but, eventually, the oyster culture of the Pacific Northwest. He resolved, he told me not long ago, "to eat lots of oysters, as many as I could afford, and to make it my quest to learn all about oysters and how they are cultivated, distributed and consumed." He haunted the wholesale market at Rungis, near Orly Airport, visited the shellfish beds in Brittany and the Charente, poked into restaurant kitchens, took notes and pictures and read everything he could lay his hands on.
www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26...26oyst.html
(Probably will become a pay article in a week or two)
