Article voiceover
Mist
You expect two things. Joy to arise from this valley and trouble found only in dust that settled behind you as you walked to this place perched on the hillcrest. You ask three questions and tell yourself this valley has three answers but you sit on top of your world looking down, as if what you seek will rise to you the way mist rises in fingers from the valley depths, as if you can reach out your hand and grasp these rising fingers, as if mist will not disappear the very moment it brushes your skin. Look at the way it blows through the valley, mist the remnant of yesterday’s troubles that fell steady from the sky to join the earth in consummation, then let gravity guide deep into the river raging in the valley floor. Come be here here where water does not provide a clear picture of what will be, here where soil and silt cast clouds that call you to offer yourself to misunderstanding, here where current beyond you directs, and here where your desire for clear sight disappears in your desperation for a clear breath of air. For it is in the river, immersed in all that was brought together where your questions glisten with the drops of yesterday, dance with dead branches holding stories to tell, grieve with leaves whose plans to shade were cut short, and touch river stones worn smooth by millennia of flow. The gift is in touching this place, your living flame joined with the cold river of experience, river evaporating into a giving of yourself, compassion rising as mist through the forest blown by the wind up through the hills to disappear without answer.
Thank you for reading! If you are so inclined, leave a comment about what strikes you, speaks to you, or stirs in you while you read. I look forward to whatever dialogue may happen here, and within a week I will be following up with a Reflection post on how this poem emerged into being.
Brian
Aside from liking your use of alliteration and consonance, I like that I, the reader, who ascended before the poem began, now descend to the river, while realizing, through that deacending journey - I imagine myself floating down in the air - the meaning of the adcending and acended mist. There is a unity in the opposites here, of ascent and descent. One knows the one through the other. Thanks for this poem.
Somehow this poem felt like an answer to a very specific query I sent out into the void--like an answer to prayer, if I still prayed. Beautiful reading of it as well. Thank you Brian for sharing your work here