Of Frost and Fog and Giants

The half-stripped trees
struck by a wind together,
bending all,
the leaves flutter drily
and refuse to let go
or driven like hail
stream bitterly out to one side
and fall
where the salvias, hard carmine, –
like no leaf that ever was –
edge the bare garden.

William Carlos Williams, Approach of Winter

Yesterday saw the first serious frost of the year.  At day-break, I looked from our library windows to find  our pines netted in rime and incomprehensible runes written in silver across our fields as if some form of tablature for an unknown instrument capable of being played only by giants.  The asphalt of our driveway was relatively untouched, but haphazard traceries appeared higgledy-piggledy in its shadiest nether regions as if drawn by a giant’s child wielding a hesitant pen – a child uncertain of his art or his muse.

The frost was accompanied by a substantial fog, the kind that defies the essence of form at the expense of detail.  Reduced to silhouettes, the pines grew in bulk and hovered on the very edge of mist-powered mobility.  As I watched, I became convinced that if I were to turn my head for an instant, enormous piney shapes would, in balletic unison, take quick, tiny, covert steps – only to become pinned in place anew should I quickly look back.

As the sun rose and gave of its warmth, the frost and fog disappeared: the fog fading to transparency in an ancient ritual invisible to the eye; the frost visibly flying away in ghostly vapors rising from the edge of our roof.

And the pines were, once again, intricately needled and freed from enchantment, the giant and his child having returned to their lair.

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