Three Water-Element Poems \ Fog

Alan:  After weeks of cold clarity, a midwinter thaw, when everything softens, shape-shifts, tries on strange clothes.

Three Water-Element Poems

I.

Mists of ablating snow.

Eagle flaps low

above the road,

chooses a snag,

settles,

becomes Raven.

Mists muddle vision.

Objects stretch,

unsettle,

flow.

Look again: Raven

turns Crow.

II.

Once, hiking The Lakes,

we rose to valleys

sodden under tight slate lids;

climbed through downpours

into cloud so dense

it was like blind

burrowing in

dark, soft stone;

then! broke abruptly

free, as if newly, partly

formed (still un-

born from the

waist down)

to cheerful island-

peaks swimming

in endless white

under simple, perfect

blue.

If that day

we were True Awakening’s

analog, still

we descended

exhausted into

saturating gloom,

went separately,

never met again,

would not know each other

now if we

did.

III.

Buddha taught: “World

is a conjuration

and a dream,

made so by our ignorance,

wanting,

fear.”

Also: “Nothing exists alone.”

Viz.: Crow is a phantasm

of Mist; Mist the same

of Crow, of Snow.

Also: “All ways of saying

are amiss.”

Nancy: There's our landscape, familiar, and our world in the fog, unfamiliar.  Watching my world dissolve and re-form makes me understand how easy it must have been for fishermen to become lost in their home waters.

Fog

amplifies and conceals

denies and resembles

becomes the waterfall

and the mountain

            from which it falls

fog indiscriminate

envelopes rose/fishing boat/

grass/spruce

here or there

it doesn’t matter

here or there

so different so same

When the fog lifts

I think, how strange

I dreamt I was a fish

I dreamt the world was

upside down, that it

smelled of roses, and old stones

or so I dreamt.