Poem 366

A haar is a sea fog, also known as a sea fret, under the right atmospheric conditions it occurs in Wellington on otherwise sunny days and imparts a strange cast to everything, a bit like a solar eclipse … a table tennis ball sliced in half was what we used when I was a psychology tutor to make a ganzfeld, a blank visual field in order to do experiments in visual perception … it was also a punishment given out at high school to write a ten page essay about the inside of a table tennis ball …

Wellington Haar

I looked at the sun through sea mist
grounded cloud tall on the sea
that tipped smoothly
                                           into our valley
the sun was an old coin
no bigger than the moon
fussy about its pale perfect disc
                                                                 and that
was our star
                           closest
I'll ever come

the mist stripped it
took its dazzle
and occluded that one eye until the whole
of the sky was bright and blind
the inside
                     of a table tennis ball

mid afternoon
people watching moving tongues of mist
like glaciers off Scorching Bay
                                                               felt obscurely
put out when the green ferry afraid
of nothing boomed straight into it
and disappeared

everyone went about their normal
business under no sun no sky 
                                                                as if
in the long run
they wouldn't be missed