“… Snow

is on the ground this January dusk,

and this fox, flat black and gray,

no burning bush, walks without hurry

among the fruit trees, then behind the shed,

and is gone. Barely a fox at all, barely more

than a tremor of wind in the bushes

behind the orchard, it needs a tidbit

of cottontail or field mouse, the under-shed

holdouts against January, small

and blooded, to stagger its foxprints

too fastidiously placed.”

from Brendan Galvin’s ‘Ars Poetica: The Foxes’