Dinner done, dishes draining, the fire
a red glow in its dark box, I step outside
beyond the porch light, the grass
stiff with frost in the home paddock,
the night sky shelved but for the bright paw
and nose of the Dog Star chasing a hare
in the scudding dark, the almost
forgotten name of a flagship tossing
into view in a time before typhoid,
cholera and sweetened damper, the gorge
rising in the dip where shots rang out
last night, our feral neighbour licensed to
kill anything that moves, floodlit
and whooping just beyond our fence line,
which a deer can clear in a moment if only
she knew she’d be safe here, but what’s a fence
in a forest of stars? The cold eats fingertips
and ankles. If I had flares, I would light them.
Makes no sense how we got here. Makes
perfect sense: a fox, right in front of me.
Three red paws on the ground, one white
lifted in mid-step, a thousand tiny
hairs aspark in the moonlight.
Breath a small vapour, electric.
Eyes like river stones, that old language
of fire held high in the brush-stroked tail
pulsing between us, two feet of charged
ground sunk without sound in a heartbeat,
the mist made mystic at knee-height.
Foxstruck. Standing alone in a paddock
pouring electricity under a night sky
blinking cold atoms without answer,
blood quickening the slow burn of fox
tricky as history, the fire before and after.
Poem
Foxstruck
Shari Kocher