Dark Matter, High Expectorations, and Clams

(Listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams's Symphony No. 5 in D major)

I am hiding between the cushy earpads of my headphones, listening the swelling beauty that is Vaughan Williams's music. I am drinking a very tasty beer, Breakdown IPA by Dogwood Brewing of Atlanta. It is late at night; I dozed off for three hours on the couch this evening. I awoke to a PBS program hosted by Alan Alda. It was about the expansion of the universe - the outer limits of it, the beginnings of time, dark matter and energy, and so on. I could only think of watching him portray Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H everyday at dinnertime through much of my childhood. I suppose my universe's limits lie closer than the ones he was explaining. I heaved myself off the couch and sat for a spell on the balcony. I listened to the air conditioners running, the upstairs neighbors talking and spitting, and the wind.

Clamming
by Reed Whittemore

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 a 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.
I've 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 sandpail,
As fate in the form of soupy Long Island Sound
Comes stalking me.

I've a son now at that age.
He's spoiled. He's been sickly.
He's handsome and bright, affectionate and demanding.
I think of the tides when I look at him.
I'd have him alone and sea-girt, 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. Son, when you clam,
Clam.