Thin Ribbon of Mist

Poetic Process, Poetic Habitation

Gabriel Hartley • 20 January 2021

The spiritscape of the land here in Fiskars surprises me endlessly. I am in perpetual awe.

This morning, as I was walking home after walking Kivi to school, I was able to take in the utter joy of the elemental spirits of the Fiskars River as it flows past the Fiskarsin Panimo brewery. The edges of the river form a thin outline of ice, roughly two meters wide on either side, and in the middle is the most luscious deep-dark water flowing, reflecting the clear January sky on this rare cloudless morning.

The crispness of the air added another layer of exquisite awareness, of a scintillating landscape singing in sheer joy, drawing all of the elements together in unison, in sacred song.

On the last leg of the journey, the stretch between the two ridges that encircle the sacred meadow at the end of our street, I felt an overwhelming presence, the presence of the spirit of the meadow itself drawing all of its elements together into one felt expression of the spirit of the landscape.

This stretch is especially significant for me because my Robert Frost book that I am currently writing has been issuing from out of the earth of this harvest field. The first segment that I wrote involved two harvesting poems—“Waiting—Afield at Dusk” and “Mowing”—both becoming for me two poems growing directly out of that earth, that meadow, that harvested field. They became in that moment poems of this earth right here, right now. Each of the segments of the book I have written since then have likewise grown from out of the earth of Fiskars, transplanted from Frost’s New England (the landscape of my own boyhood) to this stretch of Finland that I now inhabit and from out of which all poems now issue for me.

Each day as I pass this meadow since last July when I wrote that harvesting segment, I find myself in continuous poetic communication with the spirits of the place as we join together in the larger field of the poem that is this book that I am now writing.

So—to return to this morning—as I crested the hill from out of the Village on my way home, I once again was hailed by the muses of the meadow. The sky was unusually clear for this time of year, bringing me back over all stretches of time to every other sunny January morning I have experienced so far, stretching into one continuous lifetime morning exultation. I eased into the poetic communication that these muses make available to me and melted into the greater consciousness of the place before me. The sky was no longer marked by winter grays but now instead the subtle blue and salmon hues of a different winter morning. The spruces and birches were filled with snow—we got two to three extra inches of snow last night on top of the two to three feet we already have—and they gave off a subtle glow in the sun that was just starting to rise above the horizon one month past the Solstice.

Then, in what felt like a miracle, a blessing, I noticed a thin ribbon of mist rising from the canal that had been carved into the earth at the edge where the field and the woods come together, and where this canal eases into the swamp at the southern edge of the field—a swamp called Svartkärr by the local Swedish Finns.

This misty ribbon was so delicate and so beautiful and at the same time so charged with a subtle electric energy that vibrated and hummed there as it floated up from the frozen water. I stopped in my tracks—it was -6ºC, a temperature low enough normally to keep moving to stay warm—and I just smiled as I felt my etheric being melt into and merge with the energy of this ribbon beauty.

As I stood there I saw that it was slowly, almost imperceptibly, rising from the earth up along the rise of the tall snowy spruce trees until it gradually dissipated into the atmosphere. The air of the entire frozen field by this time was humming in this electrical discharge of light and earth and spirit, and I was a part of this humming spectrum. Had I arrived ten minutes earlier or later, I would have missed this apparition entirely.

As the ribbons of mist melted away into air, I noticed a figure walking down the opposing hill side of the road towards me, and I suddenly felt a little embarrassed, a little exposed in this intimacy with the spirits of the misty ribbon rising out of the frozen water into the air. I gave unspoken thanks to these spirits and continued home in joy and awe and a sense of complete poetic habitation.