Quahogging

I had forgotten life was a job, and that thinking about it that way

     wasn’t sacrilegious, despite what all those gaseous giants

in their remote refrains would like you to believe. Look how the raging

     tide itself crawls back with tenderness in the morning, tumbling

 

sea glass at our feet like the Pleiades, not penitent so much

     as programmed to appear at the breakfast table with a modicum

of self-respect, coffee and a store-bought muffin, lots of compliments

     all around, and a truly committed listen when you try to change

 

the subject by proposing that it might just be the lexicon

     that gives neighbors pause, seeming to plop what should be kept

sacred in one’s eyes into the grid of economics, as if there could ever be

     any avoiding it! So what do you do when you have no choice

 

but to concede to forces so strong they might as well be gravity

     or the tides? Our sunburned guide says take your rake up and walk 

into the water up to your knees. Dig with it, dragging till you feel

     what’s buried in the seabed catch. Keep pulling toward your body 

 

till it stops. Now lift your haul up into the air to separate the quahogs

     from the rocks. Lay the former in the bushel basket buoyed in

that innertube by your side, till from ashore, via semaphore, your shadow

     flips the script, and says to hurl it all into the bloodshot eye of God.

 

About the Poem:

I wrote the first draft of “Quahogging” with the ghost of Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” in my head. My father and grandmother, from whom I inherited a certain kind of work ethic, used to go quahogging fairly often in my youth. While I only joined them a number of times, there’s no forgetting the feeling of it, and for the sake of the poem, I imagined it as my equivalent to Heaney’s turf digging. In the poem I consider existence itself as a form of work, Jesus as a quahogging instructor, and God as a distant overseer my shadow self aims to rebel against.

 

About the Poet:

Timothy Donnelly’s most recent collection of poems, Chariot, was published by Wave Books in 2023. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his family.