A.M. Fog

Night’s afterbirth, last dream before waking,

Holding on with dissolving hands,

Out of it came, not a line of old men,

But pairs of headlights, delaying morning.

It felt like tears, like wetted bedsheets,

And suspended in it like a medicine

In vapor was the ocean’s presence, ghost

Of deep water and the bite of salt.

Here you found your body again,

The hand before your face and the face it touched,

Eyes floating, feet on invisible ground,

Vagueness like another skin.

Sent out into it anyway, because it was morning,

To taste it, touch blind hardness

Like marble ruins, and skirt the edges,

Razors in goosedown, hydrants’ fists.

Abruptly out of it waves appeared,

Transmuted from hanging silver ore, crafted

Before the eyes into curving metals

That broke into soup scum, Queen Anne’s lace.

Out of a great nothing, a theology.

Out of the amorphous, an edgeless body

Or one like a hunting mass of tendrils

That hurried down the sand, moved by hunger.

I remember a gang of friends

Racing a fog bank’s onslaught along the beach.

Seal-slick, warm from the sun

This thing would eat, they ran laughing.

The fog came on. And they were beautiful,

The three boys and one girl, still in her wetsuit,

And the dissolution overtaking them,

Their stridency, full of faith, still audible.

All morning bathed in a dovelike brooding.

The fog satisfied itself by overwhelming

The meagre dew, watering the doors

0f snails, the leeward mold, and held still.

And then near noon there was a concentration

As if the sky tried to find a slippery word

Or remember—that’s right—remember

Where it was in an unfamiliar bedroom.

And knew. And switched the light on. Wide awake.

Copyright Credit: Mark Jarman, “A.M. Fog” from Questions for Ecclesiastes. Copyright © 1997 by Mark Jarman. Reprinted with the permission of the author and Story Line Press, www.storylinepress.com.

Source: Questions for Ecclesiastes (Story Line Press, 1997)