Eventual generosity of fog

Poems waving goodbye to a coastal summer

Photo by Felix Gething on Unsplash

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Yes, I live in a state that’s prone to drought, and this time of year my thoughts (and my poetry) turn with longing toward the coming winter rains. Also, though, I live near this drought-prone state’s Pacific coastline, and I get to see moisture arriving in indiscernible ways.

[Substack’s audio recording software is bored of my poems and won’t record them without a bunch of skips like scratches on old vinyl. Please, if you’d like to, read these two aloud for yourself; a little slower than conversation pace, maybe, and minding the commas, but nothing fancier required. They love to be spoken. Most poems do.]

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RAIN, NOT RAIN                                                             2025
An Abecedarian


After midnight I hear them in the quiet
blackness-interrupted of a
city night,
drops not fallen but coalesced,
eventual generosity of
fog, now tapping
gently, gently,
hanging like tears from wires or
ironwork, drooping till they fall with
just a few inches of gravity,
knowing themselves kin to
lashing storms, but
modest in their music,
nebulous still though condensing
on every surface they find;
perhaps sent by the ocean,
questing inland, to dampen
rigors of summer,
sereness of sun.
Thanks to all showers that gather
under and down from the sky,
veils and silver beads of
water,
x-ing out thirst, turning
yellow to green,
zig-zagging tiny rivers
along every window, wire, and railing.

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COASTAL FOG                                                             2025


When sun’s gold and sky’s blue
are scarcely misted, but you hear
the foghorn tromboning out on the bay,
and the scent of water charms your senses
long after late-night dews are dried
from stoop-plants and sidewalks,

glance out once and see the faintest
feathered shimmer soften the horizon;
a moment later glance again, see where
it tiptoes, softly, slowly, up the avenue,
no higher than the housetops, modest
in its silver under the gold of the sun.

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These are new poems. I started Rain, Not Rain during a “draft ten poems in ten days” intensive in July. On a day when I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired I remembered that I’d never written an abecedarian poem, so I scribbled the alphabet down the left-hand margin of a blank page and started playing. I expected the draft to be a placeholder — box checked, assignment completed, momentum maintained; then I read it over and thought, “Huh.” (Follow and subscribe for more finely-wrought literary analysis.) And yes, this abecedarian circles back to A. If you can find a Z-word that appropriately begins the last line of a non-zany poem, I salute you; me, I needed one more letter.

Coastal Fog is a really new poem … new as in, drafted last week, new as in, normally you wouldn’t see it until at least a month from now. (My editing process for new poems is deliberate — not precious or obsessive, but not speedy.) I may decide tomorrow that it isn’t finished yet; but it spoke in its own voice so clearly, so soon, and its voice chimed so well with the first poem, that I decided to let you hear how it sounds today.

In my first Substack post, back in April 2023, I listed things my poems have in common, and one of them was “a weather report of some kind” … sometimes just a word or two, sometimes more. “I write poems from my body,” I declared then, “and my body lives on the earth, under the sky; so I write about what the sky is up to, and how the earth receives it. Not only that — but that, nearly always.” That, especially, at the end of summer, when the fogs are bringing me the smell of rain.