The Mollusk Letters
To my former landlady in Santa Cruz,
I stole the seashells. It was an accident, the movers
wrapping your basket of giant conus, conch
and murex into boxes with my broken
clamshells and scuffed sea glass from more northern shores.
I still hold the conch to my ears, hear
the crashing sea. When you read my aura,
you knew. My truest colors. That I could burn
everything to the ground.
This fall, I heard how the fires roared
down the Santa Cruz mountains extinguishing
in the ocean. I can hear the hiss,
see the sand blackened like Hawaii’s lava beaches.
What I mean to say is that I’m really sorry I didn’t stay
planted in the sand, heavy with a third child.
To my three children when they were little,
I make you grab sand crabs from the tides. I want
you to see the living, watch little legs bicycle the air.
How often I’ve thought of being suspended
in motion. I tell you about shells knowing you will leave home.
Even the triton fails to glance back at its abandoned beauty.
We will move so often. There is rhythm
to our leaving. Think of tides, moon
cycles. I will miss your first blood moon. Away
on the other side of the world collecting mollusks
to use as ashtrays. When I return
as certain as sandpipers, we’ll pool our ocean treasure—
a glass bowl holding the places we have been. Think my loves
of all the living creatures. I’m sorry you will know death.
To my younger self,
Do you remember the whiteness of Diani beach?
You had witnessed the massive migration, felt
the dry thunder of stampede. Movement as if
life depends. You rose before the sun to walk along the Indian ocean,
contemplate making a home
with the man still sleeping beneath mosquito netting.
Are you sorry to wake him bearing cowrie shells,
pearls of sand on your arms?
His mother gives you a long string of Mikimoto pearls.
Your thin neck, the pearls slipping
down the wedding dress, cool between your breasts.
You have shucked oysters all your life.
Eaten the sweet briny meat.
To the man who sells shells in Provincetown,
I have already punched my feet along
the surf from Chatham to Orleans searching.
I had come here as a young married woman.
I had come here as a new mother.
What remained from those years? Scallops, lady
slippers, moon shells, sand dollars, dog whelks.
A receding tide leaves a trace of self
like a handprint on glass or the remnants
of a dream upon waking.
I stole the perfect sea star from the bin.
To all the men I thought I loved,
The vampire squid has a small internal shell.
She wears it like a hidden broach, something beautiful
yet dangerous. It left such a small puncture,
a pinpoint of blood on the skin over your hearts.
To the Pearl Nautilus I bought at Deyrolle in Paris,
You ended up marooned
so far from the Indo-Pacific sea.
In this beautiful museum of death,
of lives pinned or stuffed,
I think of rescue, of return. I think of voyage.
Once when I was a teenager, I plucked
a duck. Its oily feathers falling
to the kitchen floor. I know I will carry you
home to wherever my home is at the moment,
drop you in the bowl of shells,
forget your provenance, forget
how far you had already travelled.
To my dead father,
Sometimes I paddle near
where we left your ashes as if
you might materialize, paddle beside me.
They say a mollusk shell is dependent
on the mantle to survive.
Every mantle injury creates a growth line.
I think of how each of your fractured bones
left a story in jagged scars.
When you died, I let my house falter
in its foundation.
I longed for crystalline biology,
for the glitter of sea glass.
I’m sorry we left you drifting
forever on a buoyant salted sea.
To my mother,
If you take this the wrong way, please forgive me.
According to Wikipedia: Mollusc shells (especially those formed by marine species)
are very durable and outlast the otherwise soft-bodied animals that produce them by a very long time.
I will outlive you. Your soft body bearing
the weight of me still after all these decades.
Are you tired yet?
My palms like scallop shells.
I wrote my love for you in bleached oyster shells
strewn across the San Juan Islands.
Our summers of sand and sail.
To my grown children,
It’s a genetic thing, I’m sorry to say.
The form of the molluscan shell is constrained
by the organism’s ecology.
You were raised in a wandering household,
riven at times.
In the tidal pool of my womb,
you already knew the concept of sea change.
When a mollusk changes from larval to adult,
its morphology undergoes a pronounced metamorphosis.
I help you move into your new homes,
unpack your short histories
that already clutter bookshelves.
What we keep. In my house of shells,
your footprints vanish.
To my grandchild,
On the day you were born I held a pink
spiny scallop shell, memorizing its ruffled
surface with my thumb. Shaped like a heart,
I slipped it into my breast pocket
once I knew of your breath, leaping heart.
The scallop’s mantle secretes layers
of minerals and proteins to grow its shell.
An inner pearly layer of nacre cradles
the bivalve. You’re born without armor,
tossed on the turbulent tide of a rising sea,
beneath a full moon’s blessing.
To the man I love,
The shell of a bivalve is composed of two parts, two halves
hinged together like a heart.
The hermit crab moves from shell
to shell over its lifetime, seeking perfection.
I have rimmed our home in seashells, gathered from the Sound.
We live with its tidal pull, the wash of its waves.
We peer through salt-crusted windows.
I’m not sorry to have arrived here—
an old home, the squall of gulls.
Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and author of Marilyn: Essays & Poems, [PANK] Poetry Prize winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, the acclaimed debut Give a Girl Chaos and Comstock Chapbook Award-winning Bite Marks. Recent work in Blackbird, Beloit, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, diode, Financial Times of London, The Missouri Review, Penn Review, Radar, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds an MFA from NYU.
