Oysters

Hans Iten

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 beds 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 to 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      Reading this poem I find myself trying to add up the words as if their total will be equal to the meaning.     But it doesn't work.   I start again. This time I envision the images. The sound of the shells hitting the plate, the water reflecting the stars, the constellations - and the poet feeling as if he is tasting all those. Then the image of millions of oyster shells opened up and discarded on a beach. A sense of futility, of desolation. Seamus driving through the countryside, and spending time with friends in a stone cottage, thinking as he does this about the distant past, the Romans transporting their loads of oysters across the mountains to wealthy buyers in Rome. (Is this a comment about how beauty has been sold like a product?) And then the last stanza - "I was angry that my trust could not repose in the clear light..." - what does that mean? Is it that he wants to be fully honest and open, but cannot trust how that would be received or used?  And - "I ate the day." Wonderful! First he eats the oyster, and it opens a crack in history and friendship and the desire to be fully open to others - and now, 'eating the day', he overrides his anger at not being able to trust truth to words, by turning himself from words into verbs - that is, action.    Words alive in gesture and motion.  Words speaking through his entire body, his life.   I don't know if that's what the poem is about, but I might be closer to it.