Maine’s mollusks of the sea are justly renowned, but let us not forget their freshwater cousins. In this week’s poem, “Margaritiferidae” poet Katherine Hagopian Berry celebrates a clam found in a lake. I love this poem’s sense of curiosity, the shimmering music of its imagery, and the intimacy it extends to this humble creature in its shell.

Katherine Hagopian Berry has appeared in The Café Review, Enough: Poems of Resistance and Protest, and A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis. She’s also been a finalist and showcase performer at the Belfast Poetry Festival. Her first collection of poetry, “Mast Year,” was published by Littoral Books in March 2020. Katherine lives and writes in Bridgton.

Margaritiferidae

By Katherine Hagopian Berry

 

Lake diving, you prize treasure, a clam

proudpalm the surprising weight of it,

fierce strength of a closed body. Alive,

I say, and we hover, hunger to break

it open, learn how otters supper, soup

tasting of something neither ocean nor salt

but a tender muscle, closer to home.

We put it on the sand instead, watch our

world wave around its boundaries

you and I and the silent lake waiting

for later, when I learn its name for you

how rusty skins can pearl, homegrown nacre

buried at the bottom of our familiar water

waiting for glory, hoarding its shine.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Margaritiferidae,” copyright © 2021 by Katherine Hagopian Berry, appears by permission of the author.