In this week’s poem, “Open Palms,” Katherine Norton offers a portrait of man, a loss, and a later life in his home by the sea. I love this poem’s loving attention both to what’s washed ashore – the knotweed and clamshells “among the rubble of lost things” – and to the quiet soul of someone left behind, but living on.
Norton is a teacher in a two-room schoolhouse on Long Island, where she lives with her family. She also loves playing music and walking her itchy dog around the island. Her work has been published in Rust and Moth and The Working Waterfront.
Open Palms
By Katherine Norton
When she was still alive,
he would walk the resting beach early,
after a storm, among the rubble
of lost things: lobster trap pieces and
fishing gloves. A water bottle, cap screwed on tight
by a sunbather, months ago when summer
still breathed hot over the sand.
Knotweed, their holdfasts severed from rocks,
thallus and vesicles splayed like arteries.
And clams, some split, open palms, empty prayers.
Clam shells are the whitest after a storm, algae salt-scrubbed,
insides pecked away. Surf clams, hard and thick,
their age etched, each ridge a year.
Others sealed shut, left to be gathered,
a meal in waiting:
butter and onion in the pot,
salt, cans of evaporated milk, a bay leaf,
and loose clam bellies full of sand,
necks toughened
from years of siphoning the sea.
And then she died, and his old knees,
tired from bearing the weight of a life on the ocean,
finally went.
And there was no one to cook,
and no one to cook for. So he stays home,
in his neatly shingled house on the corner, carving birds,
and looking out over the cove,
where the waves don’t crash or roll—they lilt.
Where the boats are safe,
and he can save his prayers for another day,
where the clams stay in the bay,
buried in the mud,
nobody’s dinner.
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. “Open Palms,” © 2024 by Katherine Norton, was originally published in Empty House Press. It appears by permission of the author.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Modify your screen name
Join the Conversation
Please sign into your Press Herald account to participate in conversations below. If you do not have an account, you can register or subscribe. Questions? Please see our FAQs.