Mist
May 29 2015


Mist envelopes the lake.

The familiar, transformed
into beauty
menace
thrill.

It's as if I'd been whisked
so far north
no one had been there before,
some impenetrable forest
no man ever saw.
An intruder
in some boreal Shangri-La,
a small disturbance
in unearthly calm.

Mist flattens distance;
the shore, almost lost,
the island, a little way off

improbably hovering.
Cool greens, and muted browns, are insubstantial
wreathed in shifting fog.
Rocks are liquid, grey, soft.
The water, washed of blue,

tree-tops

obscured in cloud.

Nothing stirs,
no breeze, no sound.

Except for me
on this unmarked path.
Leaf-litter crackling,
downed branches
snapping underfoot.
Trip-wire roots
set to trap.

Am I being watched?
I feel its wary eyes
tracking every step.
Some knowing presence,
keenly attentive
taking my measure
sure of its ground.
Some brazen creature
whose place this is,
scampering nimbly
at one with the mist.

A mysterious beast
on a shape-shifting lake
where once I felt at ease.
And neither
has since been seen.



In a cool mist, with twilight descending, the familiar lake seemed thrillingly mysterious. Looking out from between the trees, where the path edges down to the shore, it was as if I'd been transported to some deep forest somewhere far to the north; a place no human had yet set foot. The muted palette, the absence of sound, the shifting light: all gave it a faintly menacing feel. And the view seemed timeless, universal: the archetypal northern lake, distilled down to its essence.

I try to capture this here: the beauty, the menace, the evanescence; the unnerving sense of being an intruder, of being watched.