Fox's Grave

Oh the difficulties of spade and fork at times
Seem too hard, in soil that retaliates and shifts
With the trickery of memory. Once the top soil
Is shaken off the metal tip meets clay, stone,
And bone buried by years of civilisation.

Yet still I dig, the niggle of it unrelenting,
As though expecting to find a gold ring,
Or a silver ring, or perhaps just a copper ring,
Tarnished to dark emerald. Perhaps I am
Looking for a mirage, or an allusive Ark.

When I come to a series of stones - placed with rune-
Precision, a grave of rock - I am taken aback.
This is not what I have come for. But this tomb
Is lifted out of the pit, sweat dripping from a brow
As though wet from a dream too awful.

Within sacking it lies. Here a dead carcass,
Shrunken in its coarse sarcophagus. There is
A puzzle in here somewhere. The limp thing
Is open mouthed, a blood spatter on his sturdy
White muzzle, his head lolling on a broken neck.

His small ochre eyes, colour of the clay
That encases his russet body, are marble still,
Devoid of focus. There is rusty blood over
His pelt, his tongue hardened in a carapace
That once housed sharp teeth and sharp bark.

But silence has always been the fox’s trick,
His solitary heart that rebounded all others.
It cannot tell its secrets, the details of its death
Or sickness, why it could never love again.
There is only the disappointment of reticence.

I throw back the loveless body into its pit,
Knowing that it is my fault to have expected
Answers or remembered love. What could I have
Hoped for in this? Poor fox, it seems I have come
Across you seven years too late.

Picture Credit: Dead Fox With Grapes, Gregory Crewdson (1994)