April is the dampest month. A front stalls over the coast bringing wind and pelting rain. Eiders bob in the shadows; impatient gulls gather in gaggles to wait for lobster fishing season to open; the great blue heron croaks into the night. Faintly the peepers shimmer. Ice has just melted in the hollows and now fog shrouds us as if hiding the tenderness of shoots and leaves and newly laid eggs from the outside world. At night the susurration of waves strokes the darkness; a curling lip of surf limns the beach, glowing as if it were a secret source of light. Beneath the soles of my boots I feel how flooded the yard has become; I shift and slop through water that shivers above my ankles. The overflowing pond pours in a steady stream through a culvert into the sea and the dog gambols across the grass, white paws flashing.
Notes
This is an experiment in writing a sonnet in prose–14 loose observations assembled into a small unit. I do know that geese come in gaggles, not gulls–these members of the family Laridae come in colonies, in fact, if we are speaking in the “company terms” of venery. But since I am not hunting gulls, merely, above all in darkness and fog, listening to them, gaggle seems somehow, onomatopoeitically, more apt.
Visible Poetry 