No Foxes
February Poetry Adventure Day 24
The new snow is traced
with rabbit tracks
running lightly
over the deep drifts.
I would sink past my knees
If I tried to cross the yard,
my boots stuck fast
beneath the weight of snow.
I have never seen a fox here
—never seen one in the wild—
but I imagine red fur
blur against the whiteness
and the panic of rabbits.
Non-Present foxes deserve a poem now and then, as well as Present foxes!
The tracks shining in the wet lamplight ran on toward the gateshack and beyond to where they lay embedded in the bridge like great surgical clamps binding those disparate and fragile worlds and the cloudcover had moved off down from the Franklins and south toward the dark shapes of the mountains of Mexico standing against the starlit sky. - Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain