My friends cancel their daughter’s birthday party;
the wife is in labor. I wake up lonely
for an ex or, since they’re most of the women
I know, friends’ wives. The dense fog proper to
January, not the past two days’ summer
weather, feels sudden and like injury.
A meteorologist could explain:
low pressure, high pressure, relationships
I don’t get but of consequence. The climate
is to be accommodated to, kept shelter
from, like I do God’s transparent injunctions
to pluck out all. But obsequiousness
and holiness are bodies apart. Fogs
will dissipate eventually. White
privet. Blank calendar page, events crossed
out. Private dismemberment is my playing
tea house, never a lack of company,
bread loaves nor tea. The fog will clarify,
at the last, mountains; I, too, might be hind.