Belonging

Summer fog. The air thick and warm with a closeness gathering in the early morning as if all that it shrouds share a common breath. Everything holds together, birds, water, the pebbled shoreline, as a cormorant dives downwards through the still, its underwater wings stirring the cloudy strands of last nights dreams. I feel it surface somewhere in me with a shadow clamped in its beak. A few early walkers emerge, pass by, then dissolve back into the morning without so much as a ripple. The fog follows me, quietly closing up the hole I leave. I fear if I make a sound or move out of this space, the morning will collapse into a hot, harsh and angry day, pushing everything away, back into the lonely enclosures of its dislocated parts.