The fox

Illustrators with limited palettes
Would have you believe the foxes in the woods
Are as orange as workers in high-viz jackets.

They can both be seen, it is true, walking along
Disused railways, in search of food or inspecting
This nut or that bolt. The comparison ends there.

Foxes are the colour of fern in winter -
Burnt and bristling – the texture of weathered
Paint brushes dropped on deserted construction sites.

They are not door mats. And they are not to be
Easily found. You’ll sooner spot a discarded
Can of Lucozade than the resting canine.

The foxes in the fables are cunning, they say, and sly,
Merely because, hunted, they refused to die.
The foxes in the woods, in the cities, are wise.

When a fox sits to watch the crows, eternity
Follows. And of the fox’s burrows come in turn
Trumpeting mammoths and crumbling tower blocks

Lithium powered drones and common flying terns.
The poet, meanwhile, not unlike the illustrator,
Is always a word short of the bushy scavenger

A verse lacking of it’s omnivorous hunger.
The rattling fox disparaging in your rusting bins
Random recycling efforts is neither drawn nor told.

It remains outdoors, unnegotiably, yet eyeing
The red-bricked houses in the ice and the night. Blink
And you’ll spot it’s breath as it defrosts the season’s air.

Posted on 2nd February 2020