Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, FOX, by PETER MAKUCK


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

FOX, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Home from work, you slip off shoes and sink into the sofa


Home from work, you slip off shoes and sink into the sofa
with office news I try to hear but can't
wait to tell about the fox that came right up to our door.

Bear, fox, bobcat, that swamp owl down the hill who
always gives a hoot -- you've heard
these variations so many times you begin to laugh,

which is good, because I'm always half swacked on animals,
this morning half asleep when something
made me look outside as he emerged from mist by the shed.

On black forelegs, he moved ahead, slowly, toward another
fox in the glass door where I crouched, as still
as I could. What brought him so close? I remembered mice

tracks in snow, and trails under the house where I've crawled
to run speaker wire between rooms. Now just
feet away, I must have come into focus, blinked, or moved.

He stopped and stood, not quite still, but not frozen either.
Wise watching face, whisker twitch.
His thin red flanks inflated with each breath of my own,

eyes peering into our den, maybe at mine. In that long look,
I felt a kind of exchange. When I was a boy,
the bounty was five bucks. Poor country kids, we all did it.

Breatheless, I tried to lengthen the moment before it faltered
and he was gone like smoke into smoke,
that moment giving shape to the day, and you arriving,

of course, igniting this need to tell about something hunted
past words, those images we saw in France
where small human hunters once through pipes blew pigment
onto cave walls and shaped the creatures that gave them life.


http://www.unl.edu/schooner/psmain.htm
Prairie Schooner is a literary quarterly published since 1927 which
publishes original stories, poetry, essays, and reviews. Regularly cited in the
prize journals, the magazine is considered one of the most prestigious of the
campus-based literary journals.






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