Gray Fog: a Poem

A feeling of being watched; an eerie chill; the sensation of being pursued, if only by the sound of my own footsteps--this is the nature of fog.

Prying, snooping, inquiring of my coat sleeves and sticking its unwelcome nose into my pockets, seeking to chill each and every finger through.

Clammy and cold, it plasters my hair to my head as surely as would a pot of glue.

Everything is shrunken, compressed; even the sky is lower. I feel it slide past my face. I, too, feel shorter: I must stoop so as not to bump my head on the artificial ceiling.

Colors are somber and repressed; all the greens are grayish-green; the blues are seasick gray-blue-green and the blacks and grays are positively macabre.

Collecting upon the utility lines, vulture-like, it sits, and waits, dripping unerringly down my neck as I pass beneath.

I loathe a foggy day.

Originally written in 1988, this poem was a reflection of my feelings and state of mind after living for a dozen years in Pacifica, California. This was our summer weather, year after year.

I hated it. All my life, I had longed for real summers with warm or even hot weather. Summers like you read about in storybooks. Summers like New England, where we visited several times. Summers like up in the mountains, where we'd often go camping during summer vacation.

But, born and raised in San Francisco, those were not my summers. And when I married the first time, I went, (to turn a common aphorism inside out) "from the refrigerator to the freezer" in moving to Pacifica. However, that is where the houses we could afford were located.

And during our summers, I would take every opportunity to escape with my kids for at least a day or two, to a sunnier clime. My binders have a good number of poems on this theme.

I made a minor revision in 2010, but it is otherwise as it was first penned.