Half an hour following, on faith,
the car’s blunt nose and the fog’s become
the stuff that ghosts are made of, and,
off duty, fade back into. Gauze,
mothwing, vagueness, cliché,
inkling: what half-formed spirit will it usher
into our little séance as we creep
our creepy way across the barrens?
But then, as if to show it could concoct acute
as readily as nebulous – what?
We lurch to the verge:
foxes.
Four of them, dawdling, hanging out, doglike,
catlike, this one scratching an ear, that one
nipping a sibling in faux-fierce combat,
taking their talent for granted.
Who could invent a creature
that lallygags with such élan?
Now and then
one glances over, curious, I guess,
about this fog-conjured audience,
and weighing the merits of a Hyundai Sonata
as a source of food or fun.
Inside it we are rapt, two feedback loops
poured into the binoculars and re-imbibed
as sharpness – ear, paw, whisker,
nose. Then something offstage calls
and, like that, three vanish,
Only the brindled kit
side-trots up the verge,
its lavish brush floated like applause
as though that pent wit
bloomed, what
is this thing called love,
anyway? It dives
into the alders and we sit,
ignition off, attending to whatever else
the fog might slip from those
supposedly empty sleeves.