Early morning chloroform

Misty mornings are not unusual in the Pembrokeshire in August and very often the clammy murk hangs all day along the coastal margin. Just by walking a kilometre inland I found myself in bright sunshine.

Alice Oswald, one of my favourite contemporary poets, describes perfectly, and not a little prophetically,  the way in which mist locks us in.

Mist
It amazes me when mist
chloroforms the fields
and wipes out whatever world  exists

and walkers wade through coma
                              shouting
and close to but curtained from each other

sometimes there’s a second river
lying asleep along the river
where the sun rises
               sunk in thought

and my soul gets caught in it
               hung by the heels
               in water

it amazes me when mist
                             weeps as it lifts
 
                 and a crow
calls down to me in its treetop voice
       that there are webs and drips
and actualities up there

and in my fog-self shocked and grey
               it startles me to see the sky

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Extra for mycophiles: Neobulgaria pura on dead beech