the fox

The fox is a single red stroke that cuts across
the clearing. The colour seems to hang like smoke,
you can almost see where she has come from.

Her musk (though you can smell nothing)
is specific like a thumbprint on the air.
It isn’t raining but there’s a kind of wet
on your face, a stickiness of insect juices dropped.

The fox is rusty-dull, discreet, not radiant or hot
or pulsing. Not agitated. Not randy.

She is completely dream and intelligence
sliding through the wet grass, the stinging nettles,
the little brittle helmets of dry seed,
a flower or two, relics of the drizzly, petalled summer.

The lyric fox goes down to the creek
where dark and dankness will mask her scent
and the lovely rosette of her face.

She’ll be able to pause there, for a while, sip water
while the dogs swirl and bell in front of the Big House.

by Bernadette Hall
(a best new zealand poem 2009)

* * *

i don't normally post other people's words on my blog, but i liked this poem and mood it captures and i felt our beautiful, fine fox deserved fine words.  she is both elusive and canny, but curious and even a bit friendly as well. she's young and we think she lost her mother early and didn't learn natural fear of humans. or perhaps foxes are just adjusting to a more populated world and able to live among us and with us. whatever it is, we are enjoying her presence here while it lasts. our new chickens are locked securely away and the one feral chicken is canny herself and keeps herself safely up high in a tree. the cats and the fox seem to have declared some kind of detente. she was frolicking on the field this evening, quite near the horses, so they are also accustomed to her presence. she's just a beautiful, wild, wary presence here in our midst. and i think we're all a little bit in love with her.