a cul-de-sac of poems

A FOX THOUGHT
for Ted Hughes

I imagine a landscape of your poems:
A sacred wood, a Pagan burial ground
Where the eyes of the wild life shine
Blood red devouring it's prey.

Surrounded by the darkness of gothic tales.
Cold moons fall on the winter trees
Drifting behind the black sheet
Of a perpetual November sky.

Winter soil on your chalk white flesh
Deep in the womb of your savage earth.
The nonchalant delight of your toil
Free from the vulvitis noose.

That something else is alive unseen
Black velvet festhers oited in crude sway
Within black rainbows and peck the grubs
From your birds eye tombed vision.

Rain from a broken gutter spout
Unclogging earth and bits of sky,
Your poems gush, cold delight,
The purification of a stagnant well.