November in Rattlesnake Valley

by Jesse Bier

Cold fog is thick but mobile, streaming long coils
in draws, raveling gulches, strangling clumps
of young dim fir trees: moils
the air, heaves and slumps
over unseen ground, boils
spooky comfort, wallows ravines, clamps
bare corn fields, thins to mist, congeals,
smothering home and hill, with no reason spares a camp.
Where it goes is hap and hazard. Hit or miss,
this is no longer fall but winter’s start,
the drear of it, and almost the hiss
where it moves of slithercloud, gripping hearth and heart,
only easing, letting swiftly and helplessly go,
under the instant scatter magic—of first snow.