Another Foggy Night

[rejectomorph]

After rain sang as turning pines to falls and lawns to marshy softness, all the wood was cloaked again in fog, and as the rivulets ran down to stillness once more and the dripping like a ticking clock unwound to a stop, a deep catch of breath paused night, left silence hanging palpable as the cold and thickened air. As before, the fog hugged the ground so that the street was roofed by a circle of bright stars edged with a ring of stars which dimmed to a horizon circled with darkened gray which rushed forward, wrapped itself about tree boles and houses and every form not concealed by night, so the world was vague and shrunken and the sky vast. The only sign of human life I could discern was the faint scent of wood smoke drifting from some chimney concealed in fog or darkness.



Some W.C. Williams appropriate to the season:

Burning the Christmas Greens

Their time past, pulled down
cracked and flung to the fire
--go up in a roar

All recognition lost, burnt clean
clean in the flame, the green
dispersed, a living red,
flame red, red as blood wakes
on the ash--

and ebbs to a steady burning
the rekindled bed become
a landscape of flame

At the winter's midnight
we went to the trees, the coarse
holly, the balsam and
the hemlock for their green

At the thick of dark
the moment of the cold's
deepest plunge we brought branches
cut from the green trees

to fill our need, and over
doorways, about paper Christmas
bells covered with tinfoil
and fastened by red ribbons

we stuck the green prongs
in the windows hung
woven wreaths and above pictures
the living green. On the

mantle we built a green forest
and among those hemlock
sprays put a herd of small
white deer as if they

were walking there, All this!
and it seemed gentle and good
to us. Their time past,
relief! The room bare. We

stuffed the dead grate
with them upon the half burnt out
log's smoldering eye, opening
red and closing under them

and we stood there looking down.
Green is a solace
a promise of peace, a fort
against the cold (though we

did not say so) a challenge
above the snow's
hard shell. Green (we might
have said) that, where

small birds hide and dodge
and lift their plaintive
rallying cries, blocks for them
and knocks down

the unseeing bullets of
the storm. Green spruce boughs
pulled down by a weight of
snow-- Transformed!

Violence leaped and appeared.
Recreant! roared to life
as the flame rose through and
our eyes recoiled from it.

In the jagged flames green
to red, instant and alive. Green!
those sure abutments . . . Gone!
lost to mind

and quick in the contracting
tunnel of the grate
appeared a world! Black
mountains, black and red -- as

yet uncolored -- and ash white,
an infant landscape of shimmering
ash and flame and we, in
that instant, lost,

breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<center<i>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

After rain sang as turning pines to falls and lawns to marshy softness, all the wood was cloaked again in fog, and as the rivulets ran down to stillness once more and the dripping like a ticking clock unwound to a stop, a deep catch of breath paused night, left silence hanging palpable as the cold and thickened air. As before, the fog hugged the ground so that the street was roofed by a circle of bright stars edged with a ring of stars which dimmed to a horizon circled with darkened gray which rushed forward, wrapped itself about tree boles and houses and every form not concealed by night, so the world was vague and shrunken and the sky vast. The only sign of human life I could discern was the faint scent of wood smoke drifting from some chimney concealed in fog or darkness.

<lj-cut text="Sunday Verse">

Some W.C. Williams appropriate to the season:

<blockquote><b>Burning the Christmas Greens</b>

Their time past, pulled down
cracked and flung to the fire
--go up in a roar

All recognition lost, burnt clean
clean in the flame, the green
dispersed, a living red,
flame red, red as blood wakes
on the ash--

and ebbs to a steady burning
the rekindled bed become
a landscape of flame

At the winter's midnight
we went to the trees, the coarse
holly, the balsam and
the hemlock for their green

At the thick of dark
the moment of the cold's
deepest plunge we brought branches
cut from the green trees

to fill our need, and over
doorways, about paper Christmas
bells covered with tinfoil
and fastened by red ribbons

we stuck the green prongs
in the windows hung
woven wreaths and above pictures
the living green. On the

mantle we built a green forest
and among those hemlock
sprays put a herd of small
white deer as if they

were walking there, All this!
and it seemed gentle and good
to us. Their time past,
relief! The room bare. We

stuffed the dead grate
with them upon the half burnt out
log's smoldering eye, opening
red and closing under them

and we stood there looking down.
Green is a solace
a promise of peace, a fort
against the cold (though we

did not say so) a challenge
above the snow's
hard shell. Green (we might
have said) that, where

small birds hide and dodge
and lift their plaintive
rallying cries, blocks for them
and knocks down

the unseeing bullets of
the storm. Green spruce boughs
pulled down by a weight of
snow-- Transformed!

Violence leaped and appeared.
Recreant! roared to life
as the flame rose through and
our eyes recoiled from it.

In the jagged flames green
to red, instant and alive. Green!
those sure abutments . . . Gone!
lost to mind

and quick in the contracting
tunnel of the grate
appeared a world! Black
mountains, black and red -- as

yet uncolored -- and ash white,
an infant landscape of shimmering
ash and flame and we, in
that instant, lost,

breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.</blockquote>

<center<i>--by William Carlos Williams</i></center>

<hr>

Comments

[mrmustard.livejournal.com]

So I didn't realize that it was a william Carlos Williams poem and I thought you had written it. By about the fifth stanza I was like "damn, flyingblind can really write poetry." Half way through I thought "he must actually BE a poet... he's got to have been published" and then I got to the end.

It's like the time when I thought the guy in the next apartment was playing the piano... he was listening to Thelonius Monk records (in my defense, not all the sound got throught the wall).

[rejectomorph]

People mistake me for Williams all the time.

No, wait. I mistake myself for Williams.

Other people mistake me for Don Knotts.