Les plus lus ▸
Edna St. Vincent Millay
No matter what I say,
All that I really love
Is the rain that flattens on the bay,
And the eel-grass in the cove;
The jingle-shells that lie and bleach
At the tide-line, and the trace
Of higher tides along the beach:
Nothing in this place.
An empty half-walnut shell lay
upturned on the verandah.
The wren fluttered down
& poked at it with his bill,
hopping all around it
in his big clown feet.
The black walnut half
had two large openings
like holes in a round kayak.
The wren probed one
& then the other, leaving nothing
to chance.
It was time for tea on the verandah,
but nobody came.
The wren flew off.
The walnut shell rocked a few times
the navy captain
brought some shells
to be with him in the desert
he deserves a little ring of life
and how convenient to have
a road to elsewhere leave him here
Like a speechless opera
or dust in ladies’ hair,
the hiss of the sea.
I stare at the wall
without focusing
until it doubles.
From the neighbors’ unseen backyard,
snatches of an English
I can’t quite follow.
A snail comes out of
its banded shell, eye-stalks stretching
in two directions.
Squat bottle.
Who drained its amnesia?
Organ pipe.
Why emit so high a C?
Empty bud.
Where did the flower open
its red petals?
Molted exoskeleton.
What imago wouldn’t flee
such a narrow corpse?
I should have warned
you in the beginning:
I’m a matryoshka—
a series of hollow shells
ultimately leading to nothing.
The clam is a lucky creature
because it has a shell to go back to.
Or it has a shell to live in
Clammed, keeping others out.
The only problem being a clam
Is that people would pry it open
For a pearl or two
And would discard when disappointed.
It is indeed sad for the clam
To lie disembowelled, splayed,
Displaying all its innards
To all and sundry passing by...
Had I stooped
to gather shells,
I might at least
have made
a keepsake.
The oyster never leaves his shell,
And does, therein, exceeding well;
He does not have to sweat and brood
To know the joys of oysterhood;
He deems the treasured pearl a fault,
And takes his world with ample salt.
My Puritan Grandmother! — I see her now,
With placid brow,
Always so sure
"That no things but the right things shall endure !"
Sombrely neat, so orderly and prim,
Always a little grim.
Austere but kind. . . .
Smooth-banded hair and smoothly-banded mind.
But let me whisper it to you today —
I know it now —
That deep in her there was a flame at play.
Beneath that brow
The blue-grey eyes sought beauty, found it too
Most often by the ocean's passionate blue.
Her sea-beach treasures — shells and coloured weed
Gathered and hoarded with glad human greed —
In the profoundest ocean
There is a rainbow shell,
It is always there, shining most stilly
Under the greatest storm waves
And under the happy little waves
That the old Greek called ‘ripples of laughter.’
And you listen, the rainbow shell
Sings--in the profoundest ocean.
It is always there, singing most silently!