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Fox Blood
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Fox Blood Blood blister over my thumb-moon Rising, under clear still plastic Still rising strongly, on the rise Of unleashed dog-sounds: sound broke, Log opened. Moon rose Clear bright. Dark homeland Peeled backward, scrambling its vines. Stream showed, scent paled In the spray of mountain-cold water. The smell dogs followed In the bush-thorns hung like a scarf, The silver sharp creek Cut; off yonder, fox feet Went printing into the dark: there, In the other wood, The uncornered animal's, running Is half floating off Upon instinct. Sails spread, fox wings Lift him alive over gullies, Hair tips all over him lightly Touched with the moon's red silver, Back-hearing around The stream of his body the tongue of hounds Feather him. In his own animal sun Made of human moonlight, He flies like a bolt running home, Whose passage kills the current in the river, 46 Whose track through the cornfield shakes The symmetry from the rows. Once shot, he dives through a bush And disappears into air. That is the bush my hand Went deeply through as I followed. Like a wild hammer blazed my right thumb In the flashlight and moonlight And dried to one drop Of fox blood I nail-polished in, That lopsided animal sun Over the nearly buried Or rising human half-moon, My glassed skin halfmooning wrongly. Between them, the logging road, the stopped Stream, the disappearance into The one bush's common, foreseen Superhuman door: All this where I nailed it, With my wife's nailbrush, on my finger, To keep, not under, but over My thumb, a hammering day-and-night sign Of that country. 47 ...