Fog

 

 

Dale Lockwood

 

Fog

          A vagueness comes over everything,

as though proving color and contour

alike dispensible: the lighthouse

extinct, the islands' spruce-tips

drunk up like milk in the

universal emulsion; houses

reverting into the lost 

and forgotten; granite

subsumed, a rumor

in a mumble of ocean. 

                                         Tactile

definition, however, has not been

totally banished: hanging 

tassel by tassel, panicled

foxtail and needlegrass,

dropseed, furred hawkweed,

and last season's rose-hips

are vested in silenced

chimes of the finest,

clearest sea-crystal.

                                      Opacity

opens up rooms, a showcase

for the hueless moonflower

corolla, as Georgia

O'Keefe might have seen it,

of foghorns; the nodding

campanula of bell buoys;

the ticking, linear

filigree of bird voices.

 

Amy Clampitt

 

So many times the only response to a poem I can make 

is to be quiet and read it over again.

 

Clampitt is masterful at description -

 I have nothing to say that adds to her work.

She has done it all so beautifully that I see and recognize

each detail.

 

She makes it sound obvious, simple.

It is anything but.