Foglights: Attending a Sick Child at Night

1.  Pneumonia

            Beneath the floor among driftwood, seashells, sea-glass, fish-bones, carcasses  of  crow, last years toys--the hidden and the lost

            are rising,  are coming back,

            with the heat of possum, stray cats crouched in the moan of water-pipes and  old wood  softening  with  mothballs, and the steady creak  of  mattresses, the secrets of young girls in the dark,  a shower  turning on then off

            and all of it entering the air, entering the lungs

            like a recognition of the  body's drift:

            one  weakening light  on an ocean  feverish with ache and retreat,

            calls and warnings

2.  And we are listening, must listen

            For really, when the fog‑lamps come, they burn without illumination; they bulge, turn inward

            and the whole fragile world must enter if at all at the tongue and ruined throat, where each breath  becomes:

            a kind of seeing

            memory

            a fever of dampening, steaming, sheets

            and the need of the almost drowned and coming back

            to  reach with wonder into old places with new fears:

            some animal entering a crawl space rank with musk

            some child in the cottage on the hill, struggling

            to breathe

            this breath, this night, these many fervid little water lights that rise, converge, and bloom:

            fog