Last night I heard the fox bark,
a praise song lifted
into pitch night.
For years I had not heard
her otherworldly rasp,
its rapturous calling—
I am here.
I imagined her,
shambling through the yard,
her plush red coat
invisible under cover of stars
and a sliver of moon,
her eyes copper beams
across the garden,
nose raised up
to the night air
cooling her nostrils,
vibrissae alert,
tracking the scent
of rabbit and vole.
A returning is also a leaving,
a leaving, a return.
The losses
that have entered me
wrangle,
the world off-spooled
before my eyes.
What can I return to,
when the space
in-between cracks open
enough to remember
what it means to live?
Like the fox, searching
for what will sustain her,
her bark slowly spinning
into the distance.
—
Donna H. DiCello is a retired clinical psychologist and writer. She has had poems published with Blue Heron Review, Minerva Rising Press, and The Avocet, among others, and was a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee for poetry. Donna is currently working on a book about her retirement using poetry to move the narrative. She is currently enrolled in the New Directions in Writing program at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis.
