The Cartography of Fog

There are mornings the valley forgets itself, fills its own mouth with white wool until the fenceposts vanish and the road becomes a rumor told between two hills.

I have watched the fog erase a barn, a silo, the dark apostrophe of a crow mid-flight — each thing unwritten with such tenderness you might call it mercy.

What the fog takes it does not keep. By noon the orchard reappears, each apple tree rehearsing its one green argument against the empty air.

But for an hour the world was all margin, all silence, a page before the first word — and I stood in it, unmapped, breathing the beautiful nothing in.