VI: On the Road to Seattle: February

Before late morning
had entered the forest with its wakening sound,
while the valleys were still filled
with a thick and sinuous mist
that wrapped itself in air-light coils around
the birch trees, damp and glistening, transfixed
in the low bright light of the rising sun,
he saw between the slow up-rolling mists
and the low white clouds
that hid the water and almost all the sky
a promontory of the land
stretch out on to the surface of the lake,
floating, asleep, submerged,
drifting in shrouds of untouched white
where imperceptible slow movement never ceased,
as though he, live and still awake,
were softly plunged, as birds would be in water,
involved in the deep, unloaded mind
of a slumbering beast.