Perched on the kitchen table I look out
at morning fog so thick it muffles
even its own soft noise over white November
fields and does not burn off by noon
but goes on covering us all day. A year
has seemed a month or less, yet I find
I don’t work harder, now I’m dying faster,
just pay more careful attention to the sky.
Nearly all the yellow leaves are gone

and those plants I hung to give green
this winter cover the whole window now
greener every day against white mist.
Fuga, from the Latin, flight, and in the long
rests I think I hear glissando, egregious
narrowing down to that raw muscle,
my heart, with its hum of longing.
Still, I am less grim in fog and bare trees
than in October with that crazy wind. Grandeur
makes me nervous, and now the ravaged ground
and shabby bean vines seem, at least, to match
my soul. Where there is congruence, there is
hope. After long silence, there might be music,
subtle and insistent as the Hudson River,
tidal, as far north as Troy.