Ars Poetica: The Foxes - Brendan Galvin

What will make it red as that one
years ago by the woodpile, a fox that loitered
as though in revelation’s flames for
a telltale whiff of rodent beneath the snow?
Not these windfall apples hard as cue balls
in the cold, not even that pumpkin I recycled
to its plot as too big and stringy for a pie,
folded now into a white turban. Snow
is on the ground this January dusk,
and this fox, flat black and gray,
no burning bush, walks without hurry
among the fruit trees, then behind the shed,
and is gone. Barely a fox at all, barely more
than a tremor of wind in the bushes
behind the orchard, it needs a tidbit
of cottontail or field mouse, the under-shed
holdouts against January, small
and blooded, to stagger its foxprints
too fastidiously placed.