Places 04: Fog
Wandering through young trees,
at ease in this wet woods,
my footsteps fade
deep into duff.
The air has substance;
even softly touches squeeze
a brimming sponge upon my face.
Hearing— I know not what—
drops of sound resound within my ears,
I feel time’s running down and out.
This heavy air holds memories
of all that’s ever happened here.
Faint muffled notes arise and fall away,
the fog’s filled with recall today;
warm old-gone tones are dripping down
like tears, to rinse the ground,
softening wet leaves with echoes born
upon this land—
preludes played quite long ago—
before recorded beginnings began
to change into the memories named man.
Back then—
When earth was darkly hid—
without an eye to see—
empty and exposed—
did silence hear wild cataclysms
roaring through chaotic seas?
Who heard the song of willing light
or murmuring waters teem forth life
within vast oceans’ mysteries?
Silence moved and quivered
through sproutings-out of ancient seeds
and waved along the sounds of growth
among the first birthed trees
and heard the winds strum through new leaves
as woods and fields burst into song.
Forest followed grasslands;
ice downed dinosaurs and trees—
this much we know—
earth drowned in gravel, sands,
and then more seas
as landscape after landscape changed
to grass and then, again, to trees.
Right here, here where I damply stand,
huge trees were felled to feed a need for land
by hungry men with hungering families.
A squirrel jogs my reverie.
All wet and brown, scampering down
the dangling limbs of a dim tree,
bright eyed with curiosity
to upset all my musings.
It pulls me out of history
just seconds before the cell phone rings.
My fully-grown-up son
was traveling north—
he lives five hundred miles away.
Thick fog hung low along his way
a symphony in shades of gray.
He called when safely home to say,
“Hey Mom— I miss you. All is well.”
I know my son—his open-eyes—
his focus on today,
his mind stayed sanely on his road—
his trip through fog okay.
My journey turned out dimmer—
I went—ages—oh so far away.
© Ginny Emery, an earlier version was published in Places, 2011
