Capturing Fog
It was there in the push and pull when
She implored me to capture the swirling fog,
Wrapping the bodies of a million lives,
But I couldn’t wrench my focus from
The golden tops of evergreens.
That the clutch of my mind slipped a few decades
to a lean-to kitchen shack in that place
she once described as the bar where
Han Solo slipped into Luke Skywalker’s tale
making an adventure out of his earnestness.
And the remembered grittiness of living
with the ebb and flow of life’s detritus
crawled out, ploughed itself some neural pathway
To itch my skin right down to the bone.
Hearing the first woman calling for water,
Always more anything to make life bearable,
Maintain some illusion of proprieties, godliness.
Raw blistered boyish hands in the heat
pumping that never to be sated lever action sump
pulling water up from a barrel below to another above,
the energy of youth waisting into my shorts, soaking
straining for the blessed sound of runoff
announcing the end, and hearing instead
Father declaring us the one-percent, the fortunate few.
The youngest woman asks me for a photo every day
The poets, pleading the case for honest bums and arses,
Implore me to capture life within the swirling fog.
Mind recoiling from the grit, refuses eyes that fortune,
Demands they focus only on the poorer beauty
of treetops, blushing to be seen naked at sunrise
In the empty sky.