Page 28 - Savoring

Mary O’Connor
SEASON OF ARTIFICIAL LIGHT
Hunched in somber twilight
bare poplars shiver these days as if they still had something to whisper.
Fog has settled over the city, isolating man from woman, child from playmate, you from your fogged thoughts.
Put on the black knit hat and deerskin gloves and go out anyway, stepping into greyness, seeing the sidewalk a pace at a time.
The streetlights are on at midday hovering like alien spacecraft, responding in vague mechanical friendship
to the gloom. Ghosts pass on the other side of the street, walking their ghost dogs --listen: click, jingle, snuff, pause.
You feel your way forward on
a street you have known by heart muzzily from one landmark to the next:
here’s fifty-two with the briery hedge,
and next that strange man’s house, his dark moss mounds creeping from the garden path
onto the sidewalk. Fog muffles even murder, they say, soft screams damped and listeners rendered impotent
by clouds closing round them.
You are becoming a wraith yourself
barely corporeal, in time that oozes about,
though outside the fog it is ticking, ticking and you are passing it, wasting it, killing it. You are losing it.
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