Every Good Morning

You Can Listen Here

From the deep tangle of the bordering field, she has appeared three times in a week, always in the late afternoon, slipping between thick goldenrod stalks onto our lawn. This, our August apparition, this tiny fox, pocket sized, no higher than mid-calf, and in the late sun her fur has the gloss of honey. She grazes sunflower seeds, dipping her head, muzzling the grass, looking up and around, chewing, but at the first shift in the air she moves like water, her body turning and flowing into the green density of the field in one liquid motion vanishing without leaving the hint of a trail. Just gone. When I stand before the place I think she disappeared, I look for her, for that vulpine face, maybe for the sudden recognition that this creature has come bearing something more than hunger. Even when we do not speak the wish aloud, I think we want at least a thin trail of blood-beat and feeling back to wild creatures, especially in this flash-forwarding seamless now. I wonder if we do not look for any unbroken messenger who might lead us back to another way of knowing, to the old old entrance into the wonder of their oracular mystery.