The mention of the enigmatic characters of Thomas Hardy’s Eustacia Vye and Jude Fawley led me to write the following poem. Those characters emerge from the fog with a love/hate essence for their land, their environments. I have only been to Wisconsin once. I remember only Milwaukee and the morning mists over the downtown churches. I was there for two days. I felt like Thomas Wolfe unable to go home again, lost in the unknown city though Wisconsin and Kentucky are not that different. The horror novelist Peter Straub, from Milwaukee, became one of my favorites, and thus Wisconsin morphs into images of gothic romanticism as well as the ironies of Vietnam, where Straub served and whose images fill his horrific stories.

 

 

Fog

Wisconsin fog folds over the tops of red brick churches laying in wait in downtowns surrounded by industries and farms. It  chills us from the shoulders down

as we breathe it in to the bottom of our lungs and on down through the legs to the

toes, freezing them as we stand in the icy sludge on the concrete. The fog of Quang Tri does the opposite. It vines up from the ground, chilling the wet feet first, then growing into the legs, the torso, and finally filling the mind to where the land is not distinguishable as field or jungle. No matter. Decades later, the fog takes over permanently. The only fog that remains is that of Hardy’s Wessex…a mist where Eustacia Vye emerges from commune with wet nature -- and a brume obscures Jude in his wanderlust. Such poetries tarry. The Milwaukee cathedrals and thickets of tropical forest fade away, forgotten, as are the deaths and night shifts that we barely recapture.

Image Credit: Inggrid Koe / Unsplash.