Stealing
through the pre dawn dark
And
the fey woods, the phantom mist,
Gentle
azure, steely cobalt, like a water
creature
roiled and stirred from its repose
gliding sylphlike
over some great boggy
wetland, has
its underbelly tickled by blades of
grass
agleam with twilight dew, its cheeks
cooled
by the mossy branches of pine trees
standing
single file like a ghostly platoon
of
sentry men guarding the secrets
of
this strange, chimeric woodland, as a
morning
horizon unfolds in the colours
of
a woman unplaiting her auburn hair,
and
the mist
swerves
by the foothills of some great
silt
and limestone mountain,
and
swoops by a basalt rock shaped
like
a knock kneed harridan,
and
flits by a boggy grotto that must yet
harbour
a slumberous fairy tale troll,
and
tip toes by the sculptures of the riverbed,
an
elfin creature crafted from granite and the
turnings
of this earth and the flight of the stars
and
the howl and the laughter of the wind,
and
the mist
swirls
and curls into itself atop a bayou upon whose
body
a phantasmal world tosses its colours:
sandstone
whites, marshland greys, dahlia pinks,
and
the oranges and vermilions and crimson blankets
of
autumn leaves in which this languorous world
wraps
itself and goes to sleep, all kaleidoscopic
hues
that bleed and unfurl into a strange
prismatic
phantasmagoria,
and
the mist,
above
which half this world adrift, mountain tops
standing
footless in a void like floating temples,
trees
like the masts of ghost ships sticking out of
a
shapeless pool of white, like what grand sails
must
the world harbour underneath, and the susurrus
beckoning of a veiled distance by the snap of a
dry twig, by leaves crackling underfoot, by the
rustle of trees that sound much like rainfall,
always stirs me,
standing in a metro line,
or staring out the window at a city which,
to my view,
often unfolds on an overcast day,
like the onset of glaucoma.
