Dear Readers, I am clearly in a bit of a kerfuffle this week, with my Wednesday Weed on Thursday and my Thursday Poem on Friday. Normal service will be resumed next week!

I like this very much – I saw a fox once in the snow outside Birkbeck (just around the corner from the British Museum). There was that same sense of time stopping, though in this case the fox froze and we looked at one another. What did the fox see, I wonder?

Fox
For M (who calls me Lita)

by Rachel Spence

A fox on a wet autumn night outside the British Museum
fleeing into a gas pipe as I chivvy you out of the building
into the rush-hour rainshine of car metal, headlights,

trampled leaves. I’m several steps ahead when
you shout “Lita!”. And I stop. And you shout, “Fox!”.
And I turn. At the word’s promise of wildness.

Of something feral. And we wait.
Don’t know how long for if I know
one thing it’s that fox has her own time.

Perhaps she was always there, poised on the brink
of her refuge – exact, minimal, radiant in her lack
of surplus. Perhaps I was always here, longing

to tell you her eyes remind me of rocks I once saw
in a mountain stream. How if you looked closely
you’d see words etched on their skins by priests

who were also poets. But she resists. Refuses
to be anywhere but there, scared, doubling back
into her tube’s tundra. And I know if I were

to kneel down, peer in, shine torchlight over
every inch of every curve I wouldn’t see her
though her eyes drill me, down to the bone.