Fog poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry

A vagueness comes over everything,

as though proving color and contour

alike dispensable: 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.