July 2024 - Estuary

Twilight in July is a mystical and liminal time. Within its shadows mingle the vestiges of the day’s bright, hot glory and the night’s hushed, fragrant promise of soothing respite. July evenings bridge and blend two distinct environments and, in so doing, create a new one all its own.

Estuary

By Mary Pinard

The estuary is slide and suspension, a prism

of rhythms. It has a tidal chorus, high crested

in a freshet, hushed at the ebb, like in a Greek play.

Impossible to limn, almost, says an artist I know —

it’s made of remnant floods and inflow, flux, plus

mudflat habitat and beds of silt, whose sheets go

twisted, shorn, remade. Epibenthic green algae

like it there, or depending, starry flounders, anchovies,

even the longfin smelt. A form of expansion, like

an epic for a poet — the Hudson’s is 300 quixotic miles —

or a fleet, deep eddy Dickinson might have turned.

Sweetgrass, sedge weave a marsh around it, as kestrel,

curlew, vagrant shrew carry its evanescent route to light:

no two ever alike, ephemeral as phosphorescence at night.

Mary Pinard, a long-time plein air poetry contributor, is the author of two books of poetry: Portal (Salmon Press, 2014) and Ghost Heart (Ex Ophidia Press, 2022).  She lives in Roslindale and teaches at Babson College.