Landscape with Girl and Clams

by Catherynne M. Valente

We swam together, you and I, in the green river-water,
three times around the body of our white boat,
one brown-gold body chasing the other,
Minoan dolphins on a cracked mud wall,
one foot touching one finger
before the current passes glittering on
under tangled weeds.
When I think of the river that year,
it is always frozen this way. A watering hole
at which the sun drinks,
or a long green highway, straining south,
to the sea. You and I,
standing neck-deep in water like a leaf-mound,
my legs around your waist.
My toes in the silt of the Mississippi
found the ridges of river-clams.
We dove for them, feet flashing up like fins,
coming up with humpbacked,
antediluvian mollusks like gems
from an underwater palace,
hooting at the clouds with those
slimy stones
clasped in our hands.
I sunk them into three jars of clear water;
I set out my fishing pole, sightless worm
dangling in the deep;
I boiled water for grassy green tea
while the boat yawned and stretched her sails.
You fried potatoes in cheap oil,
peeled oranges into a yellow bowl.
I watched the clams with steeping tea in my naked hands,
steam sweet as wheat and breath.
      They spat out black mud
      like ink, like memory.
Their jars went dark.
      My hair dripped the Mississippi
into my tea,
and I spat my spleen and my liver together
into the clam's water,
in whose green meat lived
      a vanished husband,
your opposite in every way,
dark to your golden, small and silent,
his bones sealed shut against mine
      a lover with a hook-cruel jaw
who turned from me again and again
so that I saw only her long, swaying back,
never her face, never once.
You stood behind me,
face buried in the flesh
between my shoulder blades
your fists thrust into my belly,
up and inward, under my ribs.
      Children then, I spat,
miscarried, little fish with weeping gills
      books, too, I spat
unfinished, unbegun, pages
unpeeled from my ribcage,
useless, shorn up against nothing.
      Teeth I spat
and tea
and blood. The clams took it all,
eyeless, unmoved. They know that taste,
their lunar, lightless flesh scours it,
sand against stone.
I let them go when the moon came up,
flung them high in the silver, arching breeze,
witnessed their splashing down,
gripping my teeth in them like pearls,
the swallowing sound of the river,
the gulping of its green-black mouth.
The dirt-clung worm had searched out a catfish --
I cut it open with a dull knife.
It did not protest. It did not offer me wishes.
It did not tell me a long tale of its birth
in loam and summer-slime.
There was no golden ring in its stomach,
only blood like ink, like memory,
and bones that cut my fingertips.
      The world is not as I wish it to be.

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