Untitled - Campbell University

Fogs
Not the white-blind highways of melted moon,
pressing with soggy palms of car-tossing weightlessness,
nor the hot pavement’s aching steam-release,
when black roads send gray showers damply rising,
Not the valley’s smoggy, yellow, chemical
stink-finger gag-gliding down the throat,
nor even the thickly silent mountaintop-mists that
coolly brush prickly red spruce with cloud-white hair,
But the hollow-hovering, hill-breath phantoms
haunting Indian summer evenings
in West Virginia’s jagged, mid-state counties
fresh-censed the slopes of deepening darkness.
Lying lightly as uncertain, silent prayer,
they wisp-hinted, so benevolently, it seemed,
at thick, white monoliths and tidal terrors
that will creep, do rage, have streamed.
—Martha Owens
75