Red Fox
       

No one in town dares speak
of the vixen denning in woods
beyond final fences, testing
fine teeth on sparrows' breasts,
on berries plumping at summer's end.
Feathers in downy windrows, darkening pools
of unlapped blood, fruit-thick scat —
the evidence speaks certainly, yet the good people
say nothing, keep her name back
like God's, fear that giving it
breath swells her power.
She trumps their silence, beckons
a musky friend, joins hot
beneath mistletoed oaks, fills her den
with the milk-hunger of mewling kits,
devotes her season to gnawing
on the shell of the unspoken.

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Copyright © 2015 Robert Aquinas McNally All rights reserved
from Simply to Know Its Name
Grayson Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission