Today

Today a fog has fallen on the grass. It reminds me of the way smoke would fill the house when I would burn something as I cooked dinner for my family as a child. Only today there is no burning, there is a coolness and a damp sorrow to the air and to the dark shapes of the trees, crooked sentinels gaurding ancient secrets.

Today I asked Finnigan (previously deceased) what it was like to return from the dead. A month ago he was shriveled and weeping, a yellow-white corpse of strings. Now he is green again by some miracle of biblical proportions, though no angel moved a stone for him. He did not answer me, unless silence itself was an answer, an expression of the void beneath the rich dark earth.

Today, a bird sat on a powerline outside a coffeshop that used to be a bank, which is now a coffeeshop that has no coffee and the bird sat and did not move, a dream inside the fog. Was he really there? I sat alone in the little shop and there was no coffee.

Today I lost my phone and my mother called and there was no answer for her.

Today I imagined what it would be like to be a fog like in the Carl Sandburg poem that goes like this: the fog comes on little cat feet it sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

It would be soft and quiet, like little cat feet. Little cat feet.

Today the rain in my hair is cold and so fine that I wonder if the prickling in my scalp is true moisture or only mind tricks. The mind plays tricks in the fog. As evening draws on it grows too dark to see but I feel the fog the way you can feel someone looking over your shoulder before you ever turn your head. In my imagination, the bird is still perched on the wire in the fog in the dark like a stone and Finn sends ghost white roots seeking through the soil where he died.

Today is tomorrow’s yesterday and someone’s birthday and someone else’s worst day and today is foggy but somewhere else is not today the dinner burned but that was not today it was another day but when it happened it was today, the day when anything happens is today and in the remembering it is happening again today, today a plant died but he got better today a seed was planted a tree uprooted somewhere today, today is today is

today