The cordgrass blurs to gray suggestion.
Eiders merge—dark smudges on darker water.
The cove’s edge wavers, uncertain.
I know the herring gull is there
by sound: the measured drop and crack,
shell against rock, against rock again.
Twenty feet away, maybe thirty—
The gull works. I hear the lift, rise, release.
The clatter of failure. Then nothing.
I mistake industry for talent.
Twenty-seven years of this.
I’m forty-seven. The gull
is maybe two.
Different shells, same result.
lift, rise, revise—
the mussel stays shut.
—Chris Sessums
Chris Sessums lives in Maine and works at Colby College.