Watching Fog

Austin Holmes

beyond the rain-dampened fence

past the highway

the mesa invisible in the distance

looming in its cloak

like a red panther

power lines hover

like slender black hairs

caught in the wind

across the gray

when we can no longer

drink the water

drops of rain

fall like imitations

this cold room is unlit still

the morning has amounted to nothing

why am I sitting here

watching air obliterate air

contemplating what I cannot see

I can feel the arms

that carry us all

tremble with our weight

their grip loosening a bit more

each day

I wrote this poem on a rainy morning, looking from my office window out to the road and landscape beyond. I found myself thinking about the slowness with which paradigms of life dissipate without us noticing, and how the fragility of all things can drag us into a new sense of ourselves, and where we fit in the world. This poem is about acknowledging that fragility and our powerlessness to change it. It’s about the transformative impact a slow realization like that can have, how it can change us for the worse by taking away our wonder for this world.  I want my poems to convey the idea that although we can't alter the fragility of life, we have a responsibility to work in our small ways collectively to make the experience of life as good as we are able to, while we can, for all living things.