An Overlay of Foxes

Yesterday at dusk, out on a walk, I saw another fox. The roads were empty, and the fox stopped in the center lane to look at me. I watched as it turned and limped into the treeline. Perhaps it was hurt, or perhaps foxes always appear to be limping prettily and daintily to me. In any case, a red-tailed hawk swooped low over my shoulder and vanished after it. I could have reached up and grazed the bird's belly with my fingertips. That hawk ate an opossum a few evenings ago. My neighbor made a film of it. Maybe all this is why, today, I have been in three places: Lia Purpura's "Red: an Invocation," Margaret Atwood's "Red Fox," and the overlay of these two pieces in my own puttering brain. The overlay, I'm coming to understand, is memory: my fox underpinned by theirs. Like shadows behind these two works are all the other foxes I've read about, and isn't it something how many worlds we carry and lay down for our own feet to walk again and again.

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I first read Purpura's flash essay in the Seneca Review years and years ago. It begins:

"I remember the fox in the light I drove forth. It was just before dawn. The headlights lit the fox's eyes, who did not blink but passed the light back, so it shone between us. Two beams of dust in the colloidal silence spread and touched the dark brush by the side of the alley. The fox was ember-colored, fresh-snapped, and already cooling."

And here is Atwood's poem:

Red Fox

The red fox crosses the ice
intent on none of my business.
It's winter and slim pickings.

I stand in the bushy cemetery,
pretending to watch birds,
but really watching the fox
who could care less.
She pauses on the sheer glare
of the pond. She knows I'm there,
sniffs me in the wind at her shoulder.
If I had a gun or dog
or a raw heart, she'd smell it.
She didn't get this smart for nothing.

She's a lean vixen: I can see
the ribs, the sly
trickster's eyes, filled with longing
and desperation, the skinny
feet, adept at lies.

Why encourage the notion
of virtuous poverty?

It's only an excuse
for zero charity.
Hunger corrupts, and absolute hunger
corrupts absolutely,
or almost. Of course there are mothers,
squeezing their breasts
dry, pawning their bodies,
shedding teeth for their children,
or that's our fond belief.
But remember - Hansel
and Gretel were dumped in the forest
because their parents were starving.
Sauve qui peut. To survive
we'd all turn thief

and rascal, or so says the fox,
with her coat of an elegant scoundrel,
her white knife of a smile,
who knows just where she's going:

to steal something
that doesn't belong to her -
some chicken, or one more chance,
or other life.

Blue winter doors

I've neglected this spot for a while, but I keep track of all the passing things I mean to tell you. Last Tuesday, for instance, at 5:21pm I wrote down: mackerel sky, pink! I was sending a package at this strip mall in midtown and everything was hideous and a kind of cold drizzle was falling, but there in the southeastern sky...

Since you were, as usual, nowhere in sight, I told the old, Indian man at the counter that he should walk to the front of his store and take a peek at the sky. After I leave, I said, thinking he wouldn't have to then. And he said, I'll do it right now, so we walked up to the windows and stood there staring past the cars and power lines, and he told me, This makes things interesting. When I drove away, he was still looking, even though the light was gone.

The next day, a friend took me to a house she's thinking of buying to show me its barn. The building is long and low, a hundred years old, and a little worn out in the elbows, but otherwise very much a barn. We peered in the windows and tramped up to every door.

There were a lot of doors. The last one made me think of Maggie Nelson's Bluets: 'At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God.'

And also of 'The Door' by Robert Creeley whom I met once shortly before he died and not far away from the barn door above, the one which will belong to my friend if she buys this house, and the one which finally was unlocked and let us in. Here's the poem--I think of you every time I read it:

The Door

for Robert Duncan

It is hard going to the door

cut so small in the wall where

the vision which echoes loneliness   

brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood.

What I understood, I understand.

My mind is sometime torment,   

sometimes good and filled with livelihood,   

and feels the ground.

But I see the door,

and knew the wall, and wanted the wood,   

and would get there if I could

with my feet and hands and mind.

Lady, do not banish me   

for digressions. My nature   

is a quagmire of unresolved   

confessions. Lady, I follow.

I walked away from myself,

I left the room, I found the garden,

I knew the woman

in it, together we lay down.

Dead night remembers. In December   

we change, not multiplied but dispersed,   

sneaked out of childhood,

the ritual of dismemberment.

Mighty magic is a mother,

in her there is another issue

of fixture, repeated form, the race renewal,   

the charge of the command.

The garden echoes across the room.   

It is fixed in the wall like a mirror   

that faces a window behind you   

and reflects the shadows.

May I go now?

Am I allowed to bow myself down

in the ridiculous posture of renewal,

of the insistence of which I am the virtue?

Nothing for You is untoward.   

Inside You would also be tall,   

more tall, more beautiful.

Come toward me from the wall, I want to be with You.

So I screamed to You,

who hears as the wind, and changes   

multiply, invariably,

changes in the mind.

Running to the door, I ran down

as a clock runs down. Walked backwards,   

stumbled, sat down

hard on the floor near the wall.

Where were You.

How absurd, how vicious.

There is nothing to do but get up.

My knees were iron, I rusted in worship, of You.

For that one sings, one

writes the spring poem, one goes on walking.   

The Lady has always moved to the next town   

and you stumble on after Her.

The door in the wall leads to the garden   

where in the sunlight sit

the Graces in long Victorian dresses,   

of which my grandmother had spoken.

History sings in their faces.

They are young, they are obtainable,   

and you follow after them also

in the service of God and Truth.

But the Lady is indefinable,   

she will be the door in the wall   

to the garden in sunlight.   

I will go on talking forever.

I will never get there.

Oh Lady, remember me

who in Your service grows older   

not wiser, no more than before.

How can I die alone.

Where will I be then who am now alone,   

what groans so pathetically

in this room where I am alone?

I will go to the garden.

I will be a romantic. I will sell   

myself in hell,

in heaven also I will be.

In my mind I see the door,

I see the sunlight before me across the floor   

beckon to me, as the Lady’s skirt

moves small beyond it.

(via Poetry Magazine)

Another time, on the same route, during the crossing of the same ocean...

 '. . . she’d been there when it happened, the burst of Chopin under a sky lit up with brilliancies. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable.

And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn't sure she hadn't loved him with a love she hadn't seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.' --Marguerite Duras

Most people would have said I was too young, when I encountered The Lover, to read a book like this. I was twelve, thirteen maybe. The slim volume slept at the foot of my narrow bed with a pile of other books. I read it until the cover fell off. That was the year I had gone away to boarding school. About a year after, I watched the film. My interior was ravaged again by sharp hunger--so strong was my desire and fascination and revulsion that the awakening didn't happen once, but over and over. One bird taking off again and again within in me. When no one was around, I watched the film, speeding up to the shot of the slim leg propped on a ship railing, to the shadowed room of sex and street sounds.

In college, I brought in the passage above, the one about Chopin. (You, the bird-who-flew-into-a-window, brought in--do you remember?--Bukowski, of all things.) Now, a lifetime and several countries past those days when my toes brushed the tattered pages as I slept, I have gone hunting the book down again. On a panel earlier this week, May-Lee mentioned L'Amant, and this afternoon I pulled my copy (a new one, with a cover still attached) down from the shelf, turned to this page, and underlined the lines again, which begin: 'Another time, on the same route, during the crossing of the same ocean, night had begun as before and in the lounge on the main deck there was a sudden burst of music, a Chopin waltz which she knew secretly, personally . . .'

Lines for identifying the vanished

I have been under the trees. Before that I reheated yesterday's stew. With a friend, there was a mention again of that plane that vanished. I am deciding that vanish is an indrawn breath. Inside what body is that plane now and can you tell me what the ceiling is made of there. I'd like to know the landscape of such a place. Now, I've had more wine, more trees. I've remembered something my father once taught me about women and men a long time ago. It was a hard and amaranthine lesson about respect and friendship and despair, and he did not intend to teach it.  I exhaled the memory, watched it rise into a heartbreak of contrails that broke the amaranthine sky.

That Crazed Girl

That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea'

--Yeats

Love Letter 64

Epithalamium With A Chorus Of The Heavenly Beasts

We wed in scales, then nudge onshore and gasp
as our fins begin to separate and bend.
We wing above the snail-bred sand. Again
the sun becomes a stub of melted wax.

I promise you a fire that heralds up;
to wear your sadness like a winter mask
of pine boughs. I’ll make my arms a basket
beneath galactic lids that won’t erupt

because in sleep your face emerges, bright
unbodied runner shocked to movement toward
a periscope of stars, where, unadorned,
a monstrous ripple is ours now, both, to fight.

We’ll laugh at coins grandstanding in our palms.
We’ll hurl their metal back to deep hewn mines.
You eat the fruit. Let me choke down the rinds
that burst when you behold them. Like a psalm,

a finch shakes water from its wings, and calls,
“I have so many windblown things to tell you!”
Another finch descends, rushing through
the dimensions of its adobe heart.

Until our songs, drunk, pressurized,
collapse into air, we’ll keep our love
like yogic wisdom of banana slugs—
for I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.

I’ll give you finger bones, my mountain knees.
Sitting up in bed, beneath a treaded
sky, I’ll find you in the dark, the beaded
dark that eats my hands along your body.

Today, in wheaten dreams rolled out I find
the half moon of your eyelash drifting down,
a prism in the speculum that vows
I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.

*Esvie Coemish by way of The Pedestal Magazine. Read more of Coemish's Love Letters in the Seneca Review's "Beyond Category" issue.