Did the fox know
when it left its skeleton
at the foot of the maple
how hungry our trees are here
for the sweetness its bones leach
into our soil?
What image comes to the mind of a fox
when it smells the burning upwind?
Or is it not an image
so much as a sound,
the uptick in parts per million?
You are my hope today,
skeleton, so precisely arrayed,
as if you died quietly,
and no one wanted your bones
as much as the tree.
published in Blueline XXXVI (Spring 2015): 118.
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