Sunday, 16 May 2010

A furry love affair




There's a new family in town and I think I'm a wee bit in love with them. The mother is tall and slender with rusty brown-coloured hair and her two little ones are fuzzy and orange. I'm pretty sure that they are living behind/under the ivy-clad air raid shelter in nextdoor's garden, which must be an ideal spot for them as no one really tends that garden. The little ones gamboled out into the garden briefly but still seem quite shy – I imagine it's quite rare for them all to be out in the middle of the day. I think that they must be related to the same little family I saw dancing around in the snow last year, as over-excited as J and I.
Random wildlife sightings in the city always tickle me, perhaps even more so than in the countryside as they're so unexpected.
They always remind me of this poem...

THE THOUGHT-FOX

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.


Through the window I see no star:

Something more near

Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:


Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come


Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business


Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.


Ted Hughes


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