The other night, after a plate

of red lentils, and a Braeburn apple

for dessert, I ran through the fog.

The mid-November dark had already

descended on the world,

but my knowledge of the path,

plus the vague terrestrial light,

kept me going. How much the light

came from the hidden moon,

how much from our flimsy, flickering

lives, I couldn’t tell. But I was running

at a good clip. And then I heard

drops falling from the trees

and landing on the carpet

of scattered leaves. I had forgotten

that things get wet in the fog.

My mind had forgotten a lot. Are

the trees, too, I thought, squinting

hard through this nebulous space?

Did it really matter? My best friend

had crashed his plane, and all they’d

managed to salvage was his belt and

some bits of jeans cloth. No one knows

why. No one knows the oak that St-Exupéry

spoke of, whose shade covered my life.

Soon after I got the news (just as I was

finishing my low-calorie meal),

I noticed how the fridge sometimes

sighs louder than at other times.

When you hear that, what other options

do you have than to go running

over the fields and by the river, where

the hulks of those other trees – ash,

elm, birch – sheathed in fog, faceless,

so still, loom like stoic monks waiting

for the thunderous pearls of fog

to stop crashing through the night.  

Francis Fernandes grew up in the US and Canada. He studied in Montréal and has a degree in Mathematics. Since spring 2020, his writing has appeared in over twenty literary journals, including Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Defenestration Magazine, Saint Katherine Review, Amethyst Review, Across the Margin, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. He lives in Frankfurt, Germany, where he writes and teaches.