Taking the Back Way, Early Evening


Here by this roadside so many beasts have given up
flesh in favor of bone / the creature I swear I saw
seemed at first dead & then became alive / became its

walking, I thought at first coyote but when its motion
took it over asphalt & in front of my car it gleamed
orange, it lifted its legs in the kind of unity human

beings sometimes call time & then I saw it was a fox
& the fox didn’t see me or the car I had stopped or
anything other than the greened other side it had to

reach & its head angled my way because we both
heard a voice from nowhere / it was my voice & I
was saying oh my God a fox. & so I sat still in my

stillness & for a moment I was not I until I began
to move again, over the asphalt & up the hill &
through the minutes that took me closer to whatever

burnished beast I may or may not be after my body
has ceased to be mine / to be a beast that moves.