Discovery “To make a clam play an accordion is to invent, not to discover.”
—Wallace Stevens (on Surrealism)

It goes without saying that a clam
will lie quiet if music be played to it.
But should you thrust a concertina
in between its valves, what then?

Is this that same passive creature
that now flails in counterpoint
to the strange new growth
on its adductor muscles?

The first tentative glubs and groans
become a shifting palette
of quavery hockets and crotchets,
minims and maxims. The music

of those distorted hemispheres
everywhere takes dominion,
taming the slovenly sea
into a pandiatonic blur whose

warped chords, trapped
in a prism of infinite refraction,
mass and carom at four times
the speed of sound on land.