The first part of the poem describes my own experience when I inadvertently surprised the sickest fox I've ever seen in my seaside backyard. The second part contains my ponderings thereon. I seem to attract dead or dying foxes: see my poem "A Dead Fox" written in January 2015 and posted here on 12 March 2019. And, again, "Dawn Fox" written August 2013 and posted here on 16 October 2015. By way of contrast is "A Dead Hedgehog" written way back in January 1981 and posted here on 20 November 2011.
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1.
Rue for the creatures! Rue the staggering fox! –
That trembling swagster sinking on its legs.
Post-noon, in a yard chill with April’s damp,
It stood despairingly, then slumped to haunch,
Head-sagged with effort, panting: young but old,
Made so by its unstopping tooth-fight with
The weathered world, it shivered, staring dully.
Mange-rotted, thinned to bones, its fur a’clot
With scabs and crusted with the scourings of
The street; its flanks clawed black and bald, its tail
A pizzled cabbage stalk near stripped of brush,
Bitten and bloodied by the itch, lethargic
It hunched. But man’s disturbing and a door
Thrown open prised it to its feet; it stood
And swayed reluctant to foreclose its brief
Fur-nuzzled rest. A man strode from the door.
Instinct gave strength. That fox in turn and leap
Scrabbled on top a four-foot fence, its legs
Clutching like arms. Then, shaking, glaring back,
It launched across a chasm, flinging limbs
To grab the ivy-hanging eight-foot lip
Of an outhouse’s next-door roof, that starved
And rib-chined body flailing to gain foothold –
The crashing of the ivy, screeching of
Its claws on brick, was like a wave’s explosion
Thrashing the shingle banks at the far beach.
Dragging itself across a parapet
It lingered, peering through the ivy’s tangle
Into the man’s unquiet eyes. That sick
Quivering snout and harsh eyes flamed with fever,
Yet frank, utterly frank, about life, death!
It turned, staggering from sight, most likely soon
To die, stretched in some ditch, eyes whitely glazed,
Tongue blotched on teeth, retching its final gasps.
2.
What’s to be said of how the All high-hands
Its creatures? Humans, too, adrift, unmissed,
Curl up in culverts or some backstreet flat
With gut gripe or with chest stab taking days
To ache to death. But animals, themselves
Fell killers knowing nil of pity in
Their lust for food, call out compassion, for,
Lacking a self’s awareness, void of context,
They have no nous of what’s astir, of how
To physic self or, unsuccessful, shrive
Their souls, conscious, however loath, that fate
Has clinched them and their toppling to the haute
Unknown’s begun. Instead, the animals
Have satisfactions purely natural,
Of wholly being what by nature they
Have grown to be, of fully mastering
Their habitat, successful breeding, glut
Provisioned stomach (yes, at death of others);``
And if by wile they’re toppled prey to bruter
Flesh-ripping force, there’s resignation, pinned
By strength that’s final, and a death fast-footed
By stress. Hence, what’s before their eyes provides
Their ways-and-means fulfilments, fact and bodied,
Spating their this-world souls. But man both knows
And needs his death (Heidegger wrung this truth) –
It’s context for his urgings, findings, fearings,
Forming a self-strength make or brokenness,
Yielding an idée that in fullness won
Or even frantic self-deforming, there’s
A More to which death funnels; pain’s the price
The fallen in an Eden-rootless world
Must pay, forging death’s gasping head-heels rapids:
The paining animal finds bliss in ending;
A man in gaining self, regenerate.
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© November 2019
