Fog

 

Fog

 

All winter this electric fire

& a tree door

closed room.  In fact

 

it was last fall

October probably

if I look back that started

 

mornings of warm

in these small walls.  All

the night a cold

 

kind patient waiting.

Years ago it was smoke

going up the chimney

 

& the children would sleep

through the descension

& pressure of ice

 

that declares it is

going to stay a while.  Today,

mid-April, a coastal

 

fog inland.  Road lights

make the moisture

seem to be lifted to

 

the hood & eye, slick

on the pole.  All my life

I’ve liked morning for

 

her quiet, her tension

mannerly, gracious

as a guest.  Probably

 

also because she is soft,

those Sandburg paws

walking almost weight

 

 

 

less.  Leaf drink leisure.

Smallish drops even

teeny to the briefest

 

& relief, her endurance

of winter rewarded with

heat of her labor then

 

cooled by this thick lithe

brightness that has nothing

to do with light

 

& more to do

with what I cannot be or

write, lissome at night

 

departed by daylight.

Resurrection Sunday

Near Flood, Contoocook River
Peterborough, NH

 

Resurrection Sunday

In his darkness then an epiphany: 

such a love he must not fail.

                                Niall Williams

                                John

 

This particular river bulges with mountain

            water run-off.  It is falling

            with such velocity, it makes great

            mounds of foam that float

            & flail in the crotches of a rock

 

& the sawn-off ithyphallic

branches caught there, watching

the rise of a body gorging on snow

melt twenty miles from here,

pushed in laborious rushes

 

of contractions and rests. And

also west of here, this limb’s

mother, this limb’s sibling

saplings.  Imagine them quiet

in the sober quiet of their grove,

 

reaching up to touch their mother’s

one limbless spot.  Her pruning wound,

renamed to cicatrix. Forgiveness,

in its measure, is callus tissue, in time

the lid of an eye.  Blind by then. Or

 

outwardly sightless should I say.

Inside, beneath the cambium,

a nob of love is forming, late

twin of the limb that by now may be just

the right size at just the right time

 

to be sunk by the mud & crush of others

like it, & beaver pups touch it

like a talisman before their swim

out and against it all.