A FOX THOUGHT

For Ted Hughes

 

I imagine a landscape of your poems:

A sacred wood, a pagan burial ground

Where the eyes of wildlife blood red

devour prey.  Surrounded by darkness

of gothic tales.  Cold moons fall on

a perpetual November sky.

 

Winter soil on your chalk white flesh

Deep in the womb of your savage earth.

 

The nonchalant delight of you toil, free

from the vulva noose.  That something

else is alive unseen, black velvet feathers

oiled in crude sway within black rainbows

And peck your birds-eye tomb vision.

 

Rain from a broken gutter spout, your poems

Gush with cold delight, the purification

Of a stagnant well.