Foggy

Went to a secondhand bookstore yesterday and, torn between buying Ashbery's Selected Poems and a beautiful illustrated edition of Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie, bought myself a copy of Mark Doty's Sweet Machine instead. If only for "My Tattoo" and this section of a poem called "Fog Suite":


3.

Or else I love fog
because it shows the world

as page, where much
has been written, and much erased.

Clapboards lose their boundaries,
and phantoms of summer's roses

loom like parade floats lost at sea.
Is that what it is,

visible uncertainty?
This evening the thin fact of it

appears a little at a time,
shawling streetlamps,

veiling the heights:
clocktower and steeple gone

in roiling insubstantiality.
I take fog as evidence,

a demonstration of the nothing
(or the nothing much)

that holds the world in place
--rehearsal for our roles

as billow and shroud, drift
and cloud and vanishing act?

And, between these figuring lines,
white space, without which

who could read? Every poem's
half-erased. I'm not afraid;

it feels like home here,
held--like any line of text--

by the white margins
of a ghost's embrace.