This garden soothes like the breast of the sea, like the shell of an egg in a wild bird’s nest, like a pebble as pale as herons’ wings, in the rippling shallows beneath the sun. It soothes like the head of a long-lost dog, laid on my lap, the look in his eyes deep as the sea, soft as foam and feathers, confused with those wisps of hurrying clouds.
A poem for Paul Brookes’ challenge to re-wild the mundane and/or re-mundane the wild. Today we’re dealing with foxes (or toasters). If you’d like the join in, the details are here. I’d like to add that most of the elements of this story are true. Franz Marc provided the illustration.
Night warden
Where the kitchen stove glows still warm, cats dream, and mice dance with stray crumbs, nudge loose-fitting lids, chew holes in the mesh of the food safe.
Padding soft, almost silent, the fox in the attic descends the cold stairs, grey-ghost, in search of fat mice,
where cats stretch in sleep, in the stove-glow, their dreams full of tiny squeals.
Like last week, the Oracle gave me this poem from the first few words (forgot to try mustache again). A car hit the fox yesterday evening. There are so few cars use this lane it must have been a neighbour, going too fast because the only thing you’re likely to meet is a hare, a pheasant or a fox.
The fox in the ditch
Between light and dark, the blue hour of dusk, when all dogs are wolves, and fox is just a shadow, perhaps a bowing branch.
He ran on silent feet, dashed proud red into the lane, lies now in the ditch, where flies settle on his death mask.
Wind scatters gold poplar coins, tree-tribute to the dead, a keening in the thinning branches where jays cry.
Wind, a ship with westering sails full, a treasure aboard. Later, we hear a vixen scream, the night gives small comfort.
Tide rose and rose all night, the wind among the poplar leaves, a swell of foam-hiss dark as dust, and in the dawn the swollen roar is unabated, wave on wave.
Not fallen leaves of compost brown, nor sand churned in deep ochre pits, gouged from some dead planet’s crust, that choke this restless, turbid air,
but burning chaff and weary twig, branch and feather, tiny ashy bones, infernoed by this outrageous sun.