Four in the morning in my mind is a blank page, until the dogs insist something unusual is taking place outside. On the night of the blue moon, their ruckus got me downstairs, peering out the front door at the long-tailed shadow dancing around on the crusty blank sheet of snow.
The dancer was a red fox. He looked robust, healthy after a long winter, and he was enjoying the seed-scatter under the bird feeder, digging and nibbling on sunflower kernels left by the brash, greedy blue jays and poaching squirrels. Or was it pouncing on unsuspecting mice and moles that had tunneled to the same spot for their share of kernels?
A poem was surfacing in my mind. I had read this scene before in verse.
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
These lines from “The Thought-Fox” by Ted Hughes were playing out for real in the forest of my sleeplessness and the tense alert of our dogs. For Hughes, the poem was the fox, pawing and sniffing around the corners of his imagination until it finally jumped from the verge into verse.
Isn’t that just like March, to lurk beneath the bird feeder where the clutter of chickadees has spent all winter and then suddenly wake the dogs? This soft-furred, sharp-toothed month was an interloper between winter and spring, caramelizing the mud and then stiffening the puddles back to solid winter; loosening up the sap on warm afternoons, and then hardening the maple arteries with a sudden arctic night; snow days followed by shirtsleeve weather; and constantly nipping at our heels. March preys on our yearnings.
So does April. So do poems themselves. How often does a poem preside over the imaginary cusp of seasonal tenses — what has been, what is, what will be. A poem is ripe with becoming — our becoming informed, revealed, inspired. A poem doesn’t leave you where it finds you, with your permission and participation.
Now that it’s April, the wild things have been on the move. The dogs and I hold vigil with our chins on the windowsills waiting for something, anything, to appear. The deer, skunks and squirrels oblige, and even a fisher cat cruises through our field, piquing the extrasensory perception of Lola, the big dog. Even if she can’t see, smell, or hear them, she knows they are there, lurking and attending to the wild business of spring. I too can at least sense the atmospheric seasonal charge, electric as a rhyming couplet.
When the thought-fox moves on “the page is printed.” What comes next? Bears are still slumbering. Soon they’ll be traipsing the muddy vernal pools in a half-waking stupor. Semi-hibernation persists for a time, while they wait for victuals. But if maple trees are making sugar, can the thought-bear, and her cubs, be far behind, ambling across this page toward summer berries? My poem feeder is stocked and ready.
Todd R. Nelson is a former English teacher and principal in Penobscot.
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