Fog

by Robert Lietz

Bands of dawn fog cut the chino stalks width-wise, turn lemony, dissolve like the half dream, such as the stars had been, and the chaste grove, sizzling with cardinals. My daughter gathers her flute, her keyboard, whispering. Coaxed by fox-long further fog, by harvest hues to day-labors, I count off the dream steps, putting a farm-home orderly, storm-windows down, winter-sealing the house against the promise of first frost, the plastic heat-shrunk to frames another season. I bless this ordinary North, bless these vegetables steaming at the tables edge, and after, by starlight chill and dinner's end, feeling the dream's claim, my wife at solitaire, I see the woman's face again, my shockingly small, stroke-victim old lady, sheets pulled to chin, the World of her pain stored in that chrome-railed bed, and I, unnamed, already a blur among the atoms at that whirling rim , set off in my resentment at her dying.

A larger roar than listening shook me then, than currents shaping up a world, than news of butcheries, spills of blood and of blessed water, the lifetimes of the human haunting the oldest shrines: I imagined waves at work, convection molding deep space, worlds a living Christ comes to, for love or touch or rescue, such as the stars, the moon had been, dropping into fog, the fog breaking away to this collage of rural boxes.

I mean to tell them last night's dream, my grandmother's parlor over Park, this uncle of my mother's I cannot remember meeting, 1945, and I, already lost within the flurry of my questions, waiting for the old man, and waiting for the lady bearing me. Would I attempt to spare these 2 their later suffering, his heart attack put off giving up a habit, her stroke by diet and walking more? Or in my silence fail to urge him on the offer from New York, on the bullpen one more season, the idea of me, of homecoming, 1945, fogging the dresser mirror in the bedroom off the hallway, their work a festival set asway, a film seen through to holidays and grid-irons, to the kids they'll bear like sufferable rebuttals?

Lives I liken to my own conclude in corporeal assent, leave me to this waking, such as the stars had been, the ticking of gut had been, 1945, that binary gateway to these re-tellings of their story, and the tellings squeezed, the narrator, unprepared by his rehearsals, whispering, so not to wake the sleepers, brought from shore-mists home to fogs reopening on a planet, aching over beach stones up that wave-redrawn coast, where the last of stars, the last moonlight will have dropped away

through fog.