If you watched Bird Box on Netflix over the weekend, then you might still be too scared to raise your shades for fear of letting those wind aliens(?) get inside your apartment and force you to kill yourself after transforming into an image of your worst fear. But you should find the courage to look soon! It is so foggy outside. It’s beautiful in the way a total and absolute rejection can be beautiful, as if the city has been completely renounced by the sky.
For comparison, here’s what the skyline normally looks like from this view:
Wild.
Anyhow, time to celebrate the fog with some fog poems!
Probably the most famous American poem about fog is Carl Sandburg’s “Fog.” In the very short poem, Sandburg, a poet of the people, compares the fog rolling into a port city to a cat coming in “on little cat feet.” Is the poem about death? Nature’s indifference to human activity? Or just about how the fog is kinda like a cat? You decide.
Another fog poem worth mentioning is Amy Clampitt’s “Fog.” Though fog can blot out whole cities and valleys, Clampitt argues that it can also help us see up-close objects more clearly, partly because it blocks out anything going on behind the object we’re looking at. And, like blindness, fog can enhance the other senses. To help drive this point home, Clampitt emphasizes the word “open” hiding in “opacity” in the poem’s final gesture: “Opacity / opens up rooms, a showcase / for the hueless moonflower / corolla, as Georgia / O’Keefe might have seen it, / of foghorns; the nodding / campanula of bell buoys; / the ticking, linear / filigree of bird voices.”
The fog should last until noon. Get out there and walk around in it! You might notice that your hearing has improved.
Preliminary GOES 17 image shows a strip of fog and low clouds over valleys to the east of the I-5 corridor from Everett down into Pierce County. Light east winds are moving the fog westward into the main metropolitan areas. Please use caution on area roadways this morning. #wawx pic.twitter.com/FREmE9XJRZ
— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) December 31, 2018
P.S. If you’re driving, drive slow!
