Fox Map
Over time
you become landscape:
something sinking away
to create valleys and lowlands.
I imagine a clear stream
descending in troughs
and eddies
resisted by your fur
to pool
in brilliant
hemispheres.
Your eye,
clear as glass, green/gold of sorrel
or birch, backlit and evening
is gone
sewn in
blind:
a scar on a long hill.
Over time
you become stranger:
paths peter out, lost
in contours raised by bone,
the quiet tectonic shift
redefining earth,
the stone and soil
and frost
that built you.
Funeral for an Owl
The smoke betrays you, balling out into the room
to hang like a shroud.
Stopped in the flue above the baffle, wings folded
at terrible angles, there is nothing to you
but a beautiful, plumed husk, light as a wasps’ nest,
woven from the thinnest bones.
Outside, a gusting breeze seeks to resurrect you.
We dream your damson heart quickens
at the scurried grass, its possibilities of mice and shrew,
but you are long gone,
deceived by the darkness that shielded you,
the black promise that drew you in.
As the May sun chases shadows across the ground,
to the song of blackcap and wren we carry you
to the far field, its riven oak swarming with ivy,
and prop you inside the trunk: a ball of soft nothing,
one small hole that remembers your eye
and claws gnarled knots that could only scratch and scuff
the dreadful steel, your last glare fixed
on the far circle of stars above your twisted wing.
Header photo by Creaturart Images, courtesy Shutterstock.