Poetic Injustice? A Grocer Sees Insults in an Ode

LEAD: Life could have been kinder to Ronald Albamonti, what with the wife's medical bills, the divorce, the snooty summer visitors patronizing him like a local servant and a dwindling number of customers frequenting his corner grocery, a humble little shop called Roland's Market. (It was named after his father, who died two years ago.) The nastiest slap, though, came last month in an unlikely form: a poem published in The New York Review of Books and penned by James Merrill, Pulitzer Prize winner, poet-laureate of Connecticut, scion to the Merrill-Lynch brokerage fortune and a part-time

Life could have been kinder to Ronald Albamonti, what with the wife's medical bills, the divorce, the snooty summer visitors patronizing him like a local servant and a dwindling number of customers frequenting his corner grocery, a humble little shop called Roland's Market. (It was named after his father, who died two years ago.) The nastiest slap, though, came last month in an unlikely form: a poem published in The New York Review of Books and penned by James Merrill, Pulitzer Prize winner, poet-laureate of Connecticut, scion to the Merrill-Lynch brokerage fortune and a part-time Stonington Borough resident.

The poem, ''November Ode,'' begins: The blow has fallen, our dear dim local grocery been shut down by the State - not yet for good, though how, in whose wildest dreams, will it get its act together?

The 68-line poem also muses about customers ''closing Republican eyes / to dead mouse and decimated shelves'' and ''taking / with a grain of salt (aisle 3) all talk of heavy drugs.'' Two other lines read: ''The son picked to succeed him never lived up to the / seigneurial old man.''

A ribald limerick it is not. Nevertheless, Mr. Albamonti, who admits he wouldn't know belles-lettres from Belgian endive, found the poem so insulting, so embarrassing, that he has packed up the produce and sold Roland's, and now plans to leave the town that has been his home for all of his 40 years.

''There's no doubt who he's talking about,'' he said. ''I'm the last grocery store in town.''

Poems, unlike newspaper stories and magazine articles, are seldom fodder for libel suits. Mr. Albamonti says he has been contacted by a local lawyer who is exploring such a possibility, but probably won't pursue any legal action. In the meantime, ''November Ode'' has become one of the most widely read poems of all time in this tiny gentrified fishing village on Fishers Island Sound, a sea shell's throw from the Rhode Island border.

Mr. Merrill, 62 years old, has defended the work as a lament on the dissolution of older communities everywhere. He also refuses to say whether the poem contains depictions of Roland's Market. ''I really don't want to talk about it,'' he said. ''The poem has to speak for itself.''

Some local residents believe Mr. Merrill may have been slightly insensitive to Mr. Albamonti, but the poem was originally meant to be a sympathetic portrait of a struggle facing the town's sole grocery.

Mr. Albamonti, however, believes the poem was a deliberate poke at a recent drop in the quality of service at the 34-year-old family market. He attributed this decline to numerous family and personal problems as well as to the town's changing economy, an economy that today appreciates Camembert more than Kraft's single slices.

''They want you to act like the happy grocer and be here when they need you, but you can't make a living that way,'' said Mr. Albamonti, a beefy man who could easily pass for the sterotype of a small-town butcher. ''When there's a good snowstorm, I'm everybody's buddy, and when there's a hurricane threat, everybody loves me. But the rest of the time, they just stop by for a loaf of bread or something.''

He denied that there has ever been a dead mouse in the market. He also criticized Mr. Merrill for writing about a ''handsome cock-eyed daughter (in law?)'' - a reference, he believes, to a clerk with an eye muscle disorder. ''It was devastating to her,'' he said. ''Why he would do something like this, I don't know,'' he added. ''Mr. Merrill is far too talented to write material like this.''

Mr. Merrill, however, defended the line. ''I said 'handsome' as well as 'cock-eyed,' '' he said.

After the papers are signed next week, Roland's Market will probably shut down for a while before reopening under new ownership as a delicatessen. It's a common transformation here in this artsy and affluent town of 1,500 year-round residents, a town that the local fishermen and older residents dub ''Saab City.'' The last drugstore in Stonington died last year. The last ice cream shop may soon go out of business. The last hardware store closed two years ago.

There are, though, 15 antique shops, six galleries, two gourmet food stores and a couple of gift shops.

Mr. Albamonti plans to move to Boston or New York, or maybe somewhere in the South. He hopes to stay in retailing. He also concedes he was trying to sell the market long before Mr. Merrill's poem came out.

Even so, being shown out of town by a literary luminary seems a pitiful way to say good-bye.

''He feels he can hide behind the word 'metaphor,' '' Mr. Albamonti said. ''If he can live with himself, well . . .''