You've heard the phrase "poetry in motion" applied to many different things and people. "Walking in Fog" is free verse in motion in a sense. To me it is like a sequence filmed by a video camera in the poet's hand -- or (much more likely) in his mind. This may be no great insight, but the short-film character is one of the several gently appealing things about the poem.

I've never been in a place where all the natural features described have been combined at once, but I've been in many places where at least one is present. There are direct connections with my own memories, and so I have the background to imagine myself in the author's place and sense his reactions to what he perceives.

Most interesting is what his apparent companion on the walk -- "a dying friend" -- is doing. She's experiencing the trip in a different way, as if to savor the sensual intensity of life. I'm betting that she's of a quite different personality type than Mr. Goldensohn. It is he who broods over the physical circumstances; it is she who immerses herself in them.

I wonder if the last two lines mean more than they say:

...joyous with losing herself and coming back
in daily magic, you see me then you don't.

Is this meant to presage the all-too-real possibility of his friend's sudden death in the near future? She could be taken as disappearing into and reappearance from the fog of possibilities, each day possibly being her last and each day proving (so far) not to be so.

I enjoy the poem, although I can't help but wonder what would happen if it at least were made into blank rather than free verse. Maybe we're meant to understand (through the somewhat rough-cut style) that the poet himself is wandering in a fog -- an internal one. Yet for all of that he is aware of everything he senses, probably because of facing his own mortality through seeing his friend's.

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By Barry Goldensohn
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008, at 12:25 PM ET

Listen to Barry Goldensohn read this poem.

Everything looms at me. Hound's-tongue
with wet doggy leaves and blue flowers
starts up from the mist-streaked hillside.
Standing by itself, framed in fog
the live oak twists black arms above me,
an embrace, free of the crown of leaves that hides
the outlines of limbs in the crowded background view.
The canyon and the next hill disappear.

An owl on a low branch sits in its silhouette
in the white flame of a wild cherry
and a tiny wren weaves through the sagebrush,
singing as it stops then flashes back in.

Plunging into dense puffs and gusts of fog
along the road a dying friend wheels
and lunges from cliff wall to cliff edge
in a bright yellow blouse and blue jeans
joyous with losing herself and coming back
in daily magic, you see me then you don't.