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| Copyright Jack Brauer, Mountain Photography |
"Todd" -- 24th January 2010
It’s enough,
his laughing eyes to melt with mine
as he walks past me uninhibited.
“See me,” his sleek perfection demands.
It’s enough,
to be a woman alone with him,
in a wild, long-forgotten place
of all things, to find him waiting.
It’s enough,
his face a full moon of recognition
and my mind unsettled by his desire.
“You’re mine,” his smiling fangs declare.
More than enough,
his bold attempts at wooing, enough
to make me fall in love forever,
my soul caught naked by a fox.
"Kitsune Todd" -- 26th January 2010
He was going about fox business
when I met him again.
The trees were thick and he wore that
hunter’s grin on long black lips.
And when I asked him of the day,
he said,
“Kiss me quick.”
My heart ached like fangs sunk deep–
stealing the wind, a desert in drought.
I placed my lips to his cold wet nose
as he breathed in my vital breath.
No sound but the fire burning within,
now igniting in me as we breathed as one.
Heart sat stuck, stuck in my throat,
choking on care, desire, and whim.
He ate my heart with that fatal kiss,
devoured it bloodied red and raw.
My heart burned up in the belly of a fox,
I did not know love could empty the self.
The universe seeps in this hole for a heart,
pulse-pulse-pulsing with the beat of stars.
Note: ”kitsune” is the Japanese word for a fox, but in Eastern culture, the fox is so much more than “just” a fox. They are shapeshifters who, like many other cultures’ Otherworld inhabitants, fall in love with humans, mete out justice, trick the greedy and foolish, etc. The fox who has kept appearing to me in my border dreams is very much a kind of Otherworld fox … and his name “Todd” is linked to my animus. This poem comes from an actual dream-body experience.
"Love is a Hungry Fox" -- 27th January 2010
Last night, a dove cried on my window.
She wept for her lover in the fox’s belly,
her mourning woke me to moonless night.
“Little one,” I whispered across the sill,
“Come in and rest your tears somewhere safe.”
But she would not come near.
“You’re the wife of the fox who ate my man,
and your love is hot in him. If you feel sorrow,
then so will he, the one who ate your heart.”
Then I wept for her and for myself.
I shook with tears for all the loves
stolen and maimed in the world.
My Todd came home at first light,
his eyes a trickster laugh.
I wore my anger like a coat,
my hair a flaming red.
But he laughed at me and kissed my hands.
“Don’t be angry with me who holds your heart,”
he said with a toothy smile.
“I exist to make the little birds faster and the
sleek hares nimbler,
without me
they’d grow lazy and die, and where would be
the food in that?”
“I exist to make you, you, and
without me, you’d never learn
to be more than who you are now.
I am your longing and I will devour
until there is nothing left but an empty cup
filling up with the tears of the world.”
