Buckdancer's Choice by James Dickey

Author:James Dickey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780819570970
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Fox Blood

Blood blister over my thumb-moon

Rising, under clear still plastic

Still rising strongly, on the rise

Of unleashed dog-sounds: sound broke,

Log opened. Moon rose

Clear bright. Dark homeland

Peeled backward, scrambling its vines.

Stream showed, scent paled

In the spray of mountain-cold water.

The smell dogs followed

In the bush-thorns hung like a scarf,

The silver sharp creek

Cut; off yonder, fox feet

Went printing into the dark: there,

In the other wood,

The uncornered animal’s, running

Is half floating off

Upon instinct. Sails spread, fox wings

Lift him alive over gullies,

Hair tips all over him lightly

Touched with the moon’s red silver,

Back-hearing around

The stream of his body the tongue of hounds

Feather him. In his own animal sun

Made of human moonlight,

He flies like a bolt running home,

Whose passage kills the current in the river,

Whose track through the cornfield shakes

The symmetry from the rows.

Once shot, he dives through a bush

And disappears into air.

That is the bush my hand

Went deeply through as I followed.

Like a wild hammer blazed my right thumb

In the flashlight and moonlight

And dried to one drop

Of fox blood I nail-polished in,

That lopsided animal sun

Over the nearly buried

Or rising human half-moon,

My glassed skin halfmooning wrongly.

Between them, the logging road, the stopped

Stream, the disappearance into

The one bush’s common, foreseen

Superhuman door:

All this where I nailed it,

With my wife’s nailbrush, on my finger,

To keep, not under, but over

My thumb, a hammering day-and-night sign

Of that country.

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