Fog is usually described by what it takes away, but Dave Bonta's "Foggy" is more interested in what it gives back. In four short lines, with no capital letters and no punctuation, a landscape dissolves into texture and then into sound. The central idea is that fog doesn't simply hide the world. It rearranges the senses we use to meet it, so that something seen becomes something half-heard.
The opening line makes the boldest claim: "all is one in fog." It is calm and almost philosophical, a statement of unity rather than a weather report. The grammar does what the fog does. The only verb in the whole poem is "is," and the next line, "a fine wool," has no verb at all. It hangs beneath the first line like a thought arriving a beat late. The metaphor isn't introduced with "like." Fog simply is wool. "Fine" works in two ways, suggesting both delicate, close-spun fabric and a mist of tiny droplets. Wool also fits the logic of "all is one," because it is made of countless separate fibres pressed or spun into a single body. And it gives touch and muffled softness to something we normally only look at, so that fog becomes a material you could rub between your fingers.
The second couplet shifts from touch to hearing, and the tone becomes less sure. Now the poem does say "like": "the grove like a riff." The flat confidence of the first couplet gives way to a comparison, and the comparison is a surprising one. A grove is something for the eye, while a riff is a short, repeated musical phrase. They match in shape. Trunks stand in repeating rows, each similar but never identical, the way a phrase returns and varies. In fog, those trunks surface and fade, so the grove arrives as a pattern rather than a picture.
Then comes the poem's most delicate phrase: "half-way to the ear." It is unclear whether the grove is half-seen or the riff is half-heard, and the poem leaves the two senses blurred on purpose. The image is also physically convincing, since fog muffles sound as well as sight. The grove seems to be travelling toward the listener and hasn't quite arrived. Notice, too, that the poem ends on "ear," not "eye." After three lines of looking and touching, it finishes by listening.
There is no rhyme and no fixed metre, but the sound is carefully handled. The soft, breathy f in "fog," "fine," "riff" and "half" runs through the poem like a thread, and the airy consonant suits the subject. "All" and "wool" share a lingering l. The rhythm shifts between couplets. "All is one in fog" has three clear beats, and "a fine wool" puts two heavy syllables side by side, so reading it slows down, as if pushing through something thick. The last two lines are lighter and quicker, with "the grove like a riff" skipping over its small words. That lilt is slightly syncopated, which suits a poem that mentions a riff.
The missing punctuation matters as well. With no full stops and no capitals, nothing in the poem has a hard edge, and the only boundary is the white space between the couplets, a pause where one sense hands over to another. The title is an adjective rather than a noun, naming a condition instead of an object. Judging by the poem's tentative second half, the speaker's perception is a little foggy too, and content to stay that way.
What makes "Foggy" worth reading is how much it does in so little space. Its compression recalls haiku, though it follows no strict syllable pattern. It offers two metaphors and a simile, and each moves us to a different sense. It never explains its comparisons or tidies up its blur. The poem trusts the reader to feel that an unclear morning can seem less like a lost view and more like an altered one, in which the trees are a tune and the air is something woven.