Winter Solstice: Freezing Fog

 

 

 Here is the Winter Solstice poem for 2024: 

Freezing Fog.

 

 In the last month, there's been quite a bit of fog where I live.

 

I love the paradox of fog: it's "insubstantial" but to the eye 

it's "thick". Shapes change, shift.  

 

 

Things arise out of nothing, from nothing, and settle back into nothing.

 

From "Nine Dragons", Chen Rong, 1244

 

Things are not what they seem...

 

*Freezing fog is where supercooled droplets freeze upon contact with surfaces, forming a thin layer of ice (rime). 

 

Winter Solstice: Freezing Fog

 

1.

 

Diffuse-light through water drops. Gray sheet after

torn gray sheet fold into and out of themselves.

 

Grave-clothes slow-drift around the child in an

open doorway, watching the bird born out of fog

 

sail by, mouth open. She feels the small seed of

death turn deep in her belly, wrapped in wonder.

 

Branches reach out, refract, retreat. Something in-

side me thinks it died while sleeping (and is okay

 

with that), wants to explore: rime on glass, skin,

bark, on everything the fog has touched.

 

2.

Inside the fog there’s forgetting. Time passes differ-

ently here. Mushrooms unfold together in this place,

 

herds of bright yellow-brown caps, drawn to the sur-

face by the cold damp; ephemeral monks and nuns

 

arguing about the final resting place of a tree’s soul,

the span of a shadow’s life inside a star, the immor-

 

tality of the space between water drops in this fog.

Their voices are like music heard just before sleep,

 

polyphony and echoes, multicolored agate pebbles

tossed into singing bowls.  

 

3.

 

I see the fog-bird, a vague figure, beating great wings.

It easily navigates the shifting folds, bed curtains that

 

enshroud the dead as they wake from their death –

everything seen, heard, and touched, a gray question.

 

Crows startle at the bird’s passing, then settle to eat

apple cores, pizza crusts, near the mushrooms. If I

 

walk through the door of any house, I will run into

my own dead, washing dishes at the sink, listening

 

to Satie. They’ll turn and smile as I approach, think

I’m a fellow ghost, the fog-bird’s child.

 

4.

 

It’s getting darker. I didn’t think that possible. Street-

lights wink out. All sound has been absorbed by

 

ethereal filaments and threads around me. I hold my

breath, listen. Someone coughs one hundred years

 

away from me: a World War One veteran, feeling as

if his next cough will scatter him into the fog, body

 

become droplets, soon enough annealed to copper

pipe, roof gutter, oak moss, a crow’s beak…and

 

then he does, and his molecules are instantly re-

arranged. I guess that’s how we do things here…

 

5. 

 

Whatever appears came from nothing, returns to

nothing and I know I’m in danger of becoming too

 

permeable, so move my hands, sheathed in ice, and

instantly have a new memory of an icehouse on an

 

ice plain where gray angels transmute water drops

into gray feathers, ride opaque headlights down a

 

dark road that merges with air. How do I keep for-

getting? Air, soil; light, water; crow feather and

 

fog feather; the living and the dead: everything is

endlessly stealing in and out of each other’s houses.

 

I’ve been walking on shifting mirk since birth,

every step strange and miraculous.

 

From "Nine Dragons", Chen Rong, 1244

 

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Happy Solstice!

Happy Holidays!