Foggy Morning

Just as in sudden daylight at dawn,
when I was a young girl and had bedded down
for an overnight in a Girl Scout Little House
(a place of refuge for future courageous spirit),
the morning fog quickly appears,
then lifts.

It is mid-March and the whistling witchy wind shakes
the barren white birch in the front of the porch
of my house, scattering small branches
that twist and break from force and fly freely across
the lawn.

In the beginning of the twenty-first century,
somewhere near Tallahassee
a favorite professor of mine from college had cleaned up a farm.
It seems like I knew him ages ago.
His confidante, Fielding Dawson, had written me for a decade.
I lost contact with him just before he died that January,
after being admitted to a NYC hospital, suddenly ill.
Foggy dew gives me a lesson:
I take stock of a good season's share of a Requiem for
both of them.
I didn’t know ‘til now.
A city's tragedy for the Art world sadly comes to pass.
I met him only once in the Spring on a day like this one.

But, ah! As if a glittering mirage in the sand,
Dawson's beautiful postcards,
like the one from Havana,
lay carefully placed in a brown carton box
amongst the other of my cherished letters.

The wet dew in the "Seamrog" moves the beginning of the day
toward a talk with his ghost.