Marine Fog

I watched the marine fog roll in yesterday.
At first it was just a tongue tip up the straight,
but over the course of the afternoon,
it fingered it’s way in to every orifice,
between every island, until it breathed
it’s way up the bank, onto my street;
tickling me with it’s wetness
and causing gooseflesh bumps.
The evening became stage lit
with sudden inspiration and I laughed
with pleasure as I walked in the fog.
Some force-field of silence
veiled all sounds and cloaked my whereabouts,
so I could fancy myself alone.
Thinking accordingly, and acting accordingly,
I touched myself to prove that I was real
and that the fog was real,
and we were.

---
words: Shelley Haggard, Canada (video poems)

window to life

---
image: V. Ulea, Pennsylvania (Ulita.net)

& (thirty-nine)

The woman who might have been her mother never broke a smile. Her face would have crumbled, shed down into the abyss of a dirt road and the glint of sun, down into the earth. And if she had smiled and her face had broken it would have climbed down, all those pieces, far into the dust and the difficulties, and become a star inside the world, underneath the bed of road, the route, the path, hidden beneath the soft shoe of feet and rhythms, the bearing down sun.

She did not smile. And her face did not break. And nothing became stars or climbed into the earth, down inside the world, underneath her walking road, nothing pregnant with her fragments, nothing happening, no story at all except her and her unsmiling face, placid and unbroken.

----
words: J.A. Tyler, Colorado (aboutjatyler, mud luscious, new chapbook)

3 A.M.

As the clock ticks to 3 a.m., the sounds
of the city begin to fade: the honking cars
and jeeps and buses thin out along EDSA,
the cats in heat on the roofs stop screwing,
and in smoke-choked videoke bars,
the mike conks out, images of bikini-
clad ladies blurring into snow.

An ambulance siren dwindles in de-
crescendo until it fades into a mere
whimper, and one by one, the cellphones
cradled in sweaty palms mysteriously
flicker and die after beeping a last gasp.

Exactly at 3 a.m., like musicians stilled
by a conductor in an orchestra, like
a choir suddenly voiceless and holding
its breath, everyone is drowned by the purest
silence. And so the drunks in the neighborhood
are stunned, sobered up by the clarity
that silence brings, and couples nesting
on cramped beds make love quietly
yet intensely, each city-dweller awe-struck
by the immense, engulfing silence. In this
nightly miracle, does anyone imagine
how astounding a moment of no-sound can be?

Even the infants wake up from their dreams,
marveling at the stillness, and for once,
everyone can listen to his own heartbeat.

----
words: Rodrigo V. Dela Peña Jr., Philippines
image: Dorothee Lang (virtual notes)

Tracks

Yesterday on the beach, I walked along the tire tracks the beach ranger left. Those tracks now were gradually erased by the tide. Just like time erases our tracks and traces. Some of them are not important, so it seems, so it doesn't matter. Some are better erased. But there are some that we wish would not be erased by time. All part of the cycle, though, like leaving a year to enter a new one.

But some things linger. Like a conversation may be over as soon as the sounds of the voices dissipate into space, but the ideas expressed may stay with you. And of course, art of the visual kind and words written, those can stay a long time, from year to year, like in this blog, too. Tracks that are not erased, but that instead can remind us of lessons of years past.

Also I thought of people in my life, and remembered those who are no longer alive. It seems as though their tracks in my heart will always stay, as long as there is my heart.

And I wonder what tracks will be made this year.
What poems will be written? What sunsets will astonish?
What blossoms will be so fragrant that they pause us in our hurries?
What lovers will meet for the first time? Who will be born this year?
In other years to come, what tracks will remain of this year just begun?

----
by: Steve Wing, Florida
originally posted in January 2007