“Foxes”
When I was small my sister and I named every deer
that brushed our windows in the night and we wove
mythologies around the farmers' peacocks who each dusk
and morning broke the forest quiet with alarms:
prison-breaks, catastrophes, lost children's cries.
We cut this stanza because
Afternoons under canopies of oak my father
we felt it explained the
led our rowdy bear hunts. Invisible things
father’s importance rather
coffee
under the may apples rustled and ran from his tread.
than showing it—it read
My father had cousins in Ireland and a full red beard
too much like prose
like Irish kings and a pure tenor voice that once
exposition (although
’s
r
e
“Invisible things/under the
alk ten made him star of the choir and glee club at Fordham
W
h
d
may-apples” is lovely)
back in the city.
ig
vi
Da s to t
d
e
wa nd
dit
e e r goal age a tains In a dream once when I was seven I had a dream:
w
en
gu
ou
con
foxes came out of the woods to say I was their stolen
Wh xes,” ’s lan oem ,
e
“Fo poem This p dens e
cousin, lost in the wilderness of men long ago—
w
,
the gery. zing , and
they had ransomed me an hour to escape—
a
e
ima e am lines thos re. "If you can climb a tree you can live with us!"
o
r
som scula draw en m
o
In their bright black eyes I was reflected back
v
t
u
e
m ted out
n es
a fox. Small, quick and light I ran home to take my leave
a
w
ti
i
l
qua
raced home to say goodbye
but my father
was dancing in circles in the foyer, singing,
his hair like fire in the morning light:
O if I had my bended bow, my arrow and my string…
I called to him but his wild eyes did not know me. The rafters
rattled with his song, in the distance dogs were howling.
back
to the woods, but the quick nervous foxes had all gone,
I ran
melted into the trees, and then the peacocks
screamed before I could and I awoke.
Today a suburb covers everything:
Fields, woods, and farm—
No peacocks, but sirens—
Still in spring sometimes I wake
to a slow hare's child-like screams and
think of foxes
returning with another ransom
We cut the “suburb” stanza
because it seemed overly
elegiac—a tone Walker had
already established very well.
And the language in that stanza
is list-like and halting.
© 2014 by David Walker