Marine Layer

The street this morning glows, cool gray and wet.
Wispy blobs of winter fog roll in
like cotton balls that fell from a cabinet.
The windows drip with drops of paraffin;
steel poles run with streaks of iodine,
blotching the flaking eggshell outer skin
of paint where a crack grows, a russett vine.
I stare through the thick mist that obscures Marin’s
blue hills and the still green strait
where, on floors of needles and dripping ivy,
ravens under the white sheet imitate
a beeping monitor. Where is this? I see
a street and a sterile room. Each image lies
beneath the sheet of fog before my eyes.