Japanese for sunbeams piercing
through branches in dense woods.
Suddenness filled our separate worlds
the day I saw the fox and the fox saw me.
Her tapered nose quivered
and the space between us hummed.
I hollowed myself to go still.
It was green moment, pure
as shafts of light fingering
through leaf lace in a forest
until her body shifted and the air
became brittle as film ice.
On legs of smoke she sped,
her russet tail a streamer in the underbrush.
This poem first appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig March (2021).
—
Marion Starling Boyer is a professor emerita of Communication and has published three full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks. Her book, Ice Hours (2023), won the University of Michigan’s Wheelbarrow prize and was named “New and Noteworthy” by Poets & Writers. Her chapbook, What Word for This, won Grayson Books 2023 competition. Boyer lives in Twinsburg, Ohio, home of the annual world gathering of twins. She conducts workshops for Lit Cleveland. www.marionstarlingboyer.com.
