I was asking my students recently some advice
about my poems, and someone pointed out
that at times I have a touch of the Reverend Mike in me.
And there's the barroom tender side.
You'll hear that too.
This next poem is called "Fox."
It was begun in the fall of '73.
I used to live in Wisconsin and drive in Tuesday mornings
to teach.
This was the second war in the Middle East.
This poem was more poignant before I
got my tenure at Minnesota.
It's kind of lost something since then.
[LAUGHTER]
It's called "Fox."
"Driving fast down the country roads to a committee, a class.
When I stopped for gas, a highway patrolman
tells me one of my lights is out,
and he drives off to take up his position
behind a bush at the bottom of the hill to wait for speeders.
Yesterday, a snake, black and green,
coiled down by the railroad tracks.
His mouth bloody, he moved slowly.
He looked like he was dying.
Boats being pulled up out of the water.
The dog ran into the lake after the sticks the children through
and stood looking back at me from the gold water.
On TV, the faces of the captured Israeli pilots,
Syrian film of Israeli planes crashing, martial music.
The patrolman crouched behind the bush.
The mouth of the snake heard and read his green, black body
without ease.
A bent stick by him as if maybe a child had beaten him with it.
Maybe the same child throwing sticks to the dog in the water.
Hurrying through Wisconsin, hundreds of blackbirds
tossed up from a cornfield, turning away, Arab or Israeli.
The man in the patrol car.
The sticks rushing, failing through the air.
County road Q, county road E. The committee meeting,
waiting for me.
The fox, it is a fox.
It is a red fox.
I slow up.
He is on the road.
I slow.
He moves into the grass but not far.
He doesn't seem that afraid.
Look, look I say to the white dog behind me.
Look snow dog, a fox.
He doesn't see him.
And this fox, what he does now is go a little further
and turn and look at me.
I am braked with the engine running looking at him.
I say to him, fox, you Israeli or Arab?
You are red.
Whose color is that?
Was it you brought blood to the mouth of the snake?
The patrolman is waiting, the dog standing in the gold water.
Would you run, fetch?
What would you say to my students?
He looks at me, and I say, so go off.
Leave us over the edge of that hill where we shan't see you.
Go on as the white she-wolf can't,
who goes up and down, up and down against her bars all day,
all night maybe.
The fox for all of us.
Those in zoos, in classrooms, those on committees.
Neither Assistant Fox nor Associate Fox but Full Fox.
Fox with tenure, runner on any land,
owner of nothing anywhere.
Fox beyond all farmers.
Fox neither Israeli nor Arab.
Fox the color of the fall and the hill.
And you, oh, fellow with my face, do this for me.
One day come back to me, to my door.
Show me my own cruel face.
My face is it really cruelly is.
Beyond what a committee brings out in me or the woman
I love when I have to leave her but no human hand.
Fox untouched.
Fox among the apples and barns.
O call out in your own fox voice or through the air
over Wisconsin that is full of the falling
Arab and Israeli leaves.
Red, red, locked together, falling in spirals, burning.
Be a realer, cleaner thing.
No snake with a broken body.
No bent stick.
No patrolmen crouched behind a bush with bloody mouth.
No stick throne.
No beloved tamed dog in the water.
And let us pull up now out of the water the boats
and call the leaves home down out
of the air, Arab or Israeli.
And you are my real red fox in Wisconsin,
as I let out the clutch and leave you,
you come back that time.
Be cruel then.
Teach me your fox stink even more than now
as I hurry kind and fragrant into committee.
And the leaves following red, red, and the fox runs on.