By William Olsen

Driving in rising fog to my fading father, I’m surrounded
as if by a mind of erasure, turning trees into apparitions,
so they look dead in fog, even the young ones, especially
dead-looking are the young ones receding in staked lines
into the absence where still other trees have already receded,
the stubble fields are no more, houses are no more,
no more human memory, and the straightaway road
drops away with the seeming duty of reaching my father—
released are the proximities and distances of eyesight,
yet the usual dread, holding the wheel, is not stopping at all,
a shallows of headlit asphalt always just ahead,
a highway of missing fields, fog risen from the unseen—
too everywhere to have an end or a beginning,
the car lights have no past—no place on earth—

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William Olsen is the author of six books of poetry, including TechnoRage (Triquarterly). His poetry has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, and Breadloaf. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.