HEAVY FOG
James Backstrom
The world has gone under
without sizzle or sensation.
Theoretical branches milk the mist,
visible only in sound shadow
of a hundred-million drips
in the aftermath of a silent squall.
Fog has swallowed the woods so perfectly
I only know it by negation—
a woolly red cedar towering above maple and alder,
elderberry and salmonberry crowding the fence.
My memory is more metaphorical than photographic,
a negative to a picture I’ve lost.
Yesterday, around 1 pm, the fog finally lifted.
I was surprised by two pine jays
quarreling about famine on the edge of the greenbelt.
Their blue-feathered brilliance, like bits of the pure stratosphere
fallen among the gray and withered woods,
flitted obstinately against cold hunger.
Even in winter the universe might break anew.
A weak sun pulled away the mist
and the wet world glistened for a while.
A stack of essays waited grading on the kitchen table,
but I wandered out to the garden
to inspect the mulched-covered rows,
and plan for an early spring that might not come.
By dusk, though, the dew point settled again on oblivion,
and we were cozy as corpses under dark, dank soil.
No stars or wind-dancing branches
beyond our windows,
only a clinging darkness,
a night in heavy fog.
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