The Earth Turns South/Out of the Fog

by Clement Richardson Wood

OUT OF THE FOG

I.
To and fro in the heavy fog we walk,
All of us, all life through,
Brain fog . . . heart fog. . . .
And neither the blinding flare of midday
Nor the bright blackness of starless midnight
Nor books, nor the words we say and hear,
Can clear away the mistiness.
Numb, dozing, beast-like we trudge,
Dully aware of objects near,
Unable to pierce to the shining splendor around.
Until at last some inner storm of passion,
And the lightning tears wide the gray shroud
For one clear, soul-shaking vision.
Over the sharp reality of things the mists return,
And we go down the foggy way
To its foggy goal.

II.
Across in the subway they sat,
A mother and father, two sons and a daughter.
The incurious sitters speculated idly
On the woman's cheap sailor and sheer waist,
Her new glossed slippers. . . .
On the man's tired face and shiny serge. . . .
On the boys' bright glances,
And the girl's flushed cheek on her father's coat.
Then turned as idly to the car cards above,
Flamboyant praises of soup and corsets;
And slipped to a thousand unaimed fancies
Of the end of the trip, and what would come next,
And yesterday . . . and yesterday. . . .

III.
Did any one of us see through the fog
To the reality there before him,
In this family or any family, this thing or any thing?
Time did not begin and end in that instant.
Did we see back to babies clenched to burdened breasts,
Or the dreadful hours of swollen torment,
With the doctor's casual comments to the head nurse,
Before he turned again to his bloody task
As out of the shaken chaos within
This child, breathless, and tiny,
Was pushed forth?
So for each child. . . .
All this, and the wedding and wooing before,
And the girlhood's myriad incidents,
And another narrowing gate, and so unending,
All this is motherhood.

IV.
The father beside—had he no part in this?
As spark to the fuel, as breathing to the body,
As the current to the motionless subway train,
So had he been.
In the dark cavern of mating
A part of him, vibrant and seeking, urged forth,
Avidly finding its goal, before the child began.
This part of him had been shaped in his inner being
Out of the air and food,
Out of growing plant and breathless soil
Gathered from lost byfields of the earth,
Ceylon, Sumatra, Alberta, Louisiana,
By hordes of his laboring brothers,
Each with his own world of incidents. . . .
All of these are in fatherhood.

V.
So backward goes the chain,
Each mortal lessening to a child,
And on to mating cells in the darkness,
The human telescoping again and again,
Back through the frozen ages of earth
And the tropic flowering before them,
So on to the first timid stirrers in the water,
And the burning star-ages earlier.
The restless skin of the earth
Writhes into plant and fish, bird and man,
And what lies in the fog of the future.

VI.
Across in the subway they sit.
They chatter, and yawn, and drowse,
Dwellers in the fog,
Unseeing themselves, or any other thing,
Themselves unseen, except for a fleeting fog-view.
The cars grind to a standstill,
Eyes fall from the car cards,
They pass jostling into the crowd,
Out of the fog, . . . into the fog, . . .
Leaving the fog behind.