Mist
Its
beauty burns away in the day
but
last night it filled, overbanking
the
valley and up to the window catch
like a
wave over an ocean headland, below
only a
monochrome Lloyd Rees over
everything
known, no snow gum, too
erasing
winter-wood stacks, all down-
covered,
blanked, familiar boundaries’ absolute
reassurances
lost and with them the courtesy
of
belonging. Last night driving, who
trailed
wraith tendrils across Thursday,
what put
another realm there, dared it
to
wrap the headlights in its touch,
car
surging through the moment, sped up
as if
through amnesia, to give eye
back
its parameters and there! the thwack,
a
night-bird’s wings angel-spread against
deep
blue. At home’s glow, mist
is lost
to dog bounce, baked apple, its ghostly
unreality
reasserts noiselessly, wrapped about
the
house, when lights-off night vision
reveals
a moon riding high: its light belongs
on the
mist, in the valley, it’s not culpable
for
blotting out our containment, this
moment
all is only mist, sky and moonlight,
the
beginning of something very old, right now.
Written
in response to Kit Kelen’s ‘Waiting for Alfred’ using the last word in each of
his poem’s lines as the last word in each of this poem’s lines.
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