I'll read one other poem from The Vixen.
It's a poem addressed to the vixen, called "Vixen."
When I had the book all together and friends ask me
what I was going to call it, I said "The Vixen."
And people were almost unanimously shocked at the idea
that one would have a title like that.
They assumed that it must be a symbolic, vindictive act, been
some unhappy love affair or something like that.
But the vixen is a female fox.
And you have to see her as a female fox
before you start thinking whether she means anything
else or not.
"Vixen"-- "Cognitive stillness, princess of what is over.
High note held without trembling, without voice,
without sound, aura of complete darkness, keeper of those
kept secrets, of the destroyed stories, the escaped dreams,
the sentences never caught in words,
warden of where the river went, touch of its surface,
symbol of the extinguished, window onto the hidden place
and the other time.
At the foot of the wall by the road, patient without waiting
in the full moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born,
you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me.
You are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you.
Even now you are unharmed, even now perfect
as you have always been.
Now when your light paws are running on the breathless
night, on the bridge with one end, I remember you.
When I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer.
When I have seen you, I winked and slipped from the calendars,
from the creeds of difference and the contradictions that
were my life, and all the crumbling fabrications
as long as it lasted, until something that we were
had ended.
When you are no longer anything, let
me catch sight of you again going over the wall.
And before the garden is extinct and the woods
are figures guttering on a screen,
let my words find their own places in the silence
after the animals."