Such a dark and foggy morning, smudged with streetlight, window light. A storm is on the way: wind and rain, which I hope won't impact tomorrow's drive north. For now, though, just this fog--thick, quiet, over a Sunday-silent street.

So much suffering . . . Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, and around the corner. Weatherbeaten faces of panhandlers shivering on median strips. The blink and burr of hospital monitors. The bodies of children in a bombed-out building.

Meanwhile, I sit here on my shabby couch, with my coffee and my cat. It is unfair. It is unconscionable. It is impossible to parse.

* * *

Oliver Twist is young man's novel. Dickens was filled with adolescent ire, overflowing with glib prejudices and solutions, his voice devolving into a terrible comedy as he described children trapped in chimneys or starving to death in cellars. The cartoon descriptions are horrifying, as he meant them to be, but they also reveal a tyro-poet reeling through his sentences, drunk on his own talent for conjuring up such vivid, shocking, hilarious horrors. 

* * *

What does it mean to see oneself?

* * *

To inhabit the consolations of bare ground in December . . . The last of the kale curling up from among a few scattered lumps of snow.  Grass, dull as khaki: the shine of holly berries and shriveled crabapples: heaps of acorns, like wooden marbles . . . My mind stands beside the bay; watches eiders bob in the small ripples. There are no answers, only a constant shift and flail, among puzzles and locked gates. Still, something cracks.