Sand Men For Quahogs

Poetry by Lauren Camp

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Lauren Camp is the author of three books, most recently One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), which won the Dorset Prize. Her poems appear in the New England Review, Poetry International, Slice, The Seattle Review, World Literature Today, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Other literary honors include the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize, an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, a residency at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, and a Black Earth Institute Fellowship. She is the producer and host of Santa Fe Public Radio’s “Audio Saucepan,” which interweaves music with contemporary poetry. See more of her work at www.laurencamp.com.

In 2004, the Gaea Foundation gifted me with a two-month residency in Provincetown, Massachusetts. This was my first extended time with the ocean. I wanted to learn its rhythms and understand its science. I side-walked the waves, fascinated by their attack and release, obsessed with the ocean’s transience. I spent much of the months alone, by choice. One day, I returned to the beach across from my cottage, and saw men doing an activity I couldn’t identify. In fact, it wasn’t until much later that I made sense of their project—partly through the research required to write this.

Sand Men For Quahogs

After the shadow-crumpled summer has settled

to stiff curls of wind,

the churn of melancholy

and more clothes on bone, I come upon men

squatting in soggy sand with angled pitchforks,

scraping through shallow water

as they’d undo a lover, through suck

and nick to some sort of marrow.

The sun needles with no particular advancement

And the men rake the shore.

Sand cut by metal releases.

Out by the dozens for hours without speaking, those men

in chunky boots, scan

the table of ocean, probing, unfolding

with long-handled tools,

steady and patient. I walk

hole to hole, want permission to see

what falls to the chapels

of pails from chipped tines,

what flutters from buried in froth and plucking?

Behind them, a wave has gone vertical,

then tenses to side-stretch,

its heart always pumping, its only purpose

to repeat its contractions.

The men keep wading

in what looks only like surface. I memorize

their advancing, the proper coordinates

for stripping the thigh

of the beach its benevolent treasures.

Spare or full moon, three days from invective storm.

The sun continues hoisting and falling

while men in waders unbury the shallows,

seeking keyholes. They crosshatch the sand,

drop their prizes with a shell-tang

to aluminum buckets. At home

that night, salt will flame

in their hands, they’ll say grace to fragrance:

clam pies and fritters

stuffed or dimpled with butter,

littlenecks, topnecks, cherrystones, chowders.