I had gone on Easter Day
early and alone
to be beyond insidious bells
(that any other Sunday I’d not hear)
up to the hills
where are winds
to blow away commination.
In the frail first light I saw him,
unreal and sudden
through lifting mist,
a fox on a barn door,
nailed
like a coloured plaster Christ
in a Spanish shrine,
his tail coiled around his loins.
Sideways his head hung limply,
his ears snagged with burdock,
his dry nose plugged with black blood.
For two days he’d held the orthodox pose.
The endemic English noise of Easter Sunday morning
was mixed with the mist swirling
and might have moved his stiff head.
Under the hill
the ringing had begun.
As the sun rose red
on the stains of his bleeding
to press on seemed the best thing.
I walked the length of the day’s obsession.
At dusk I was swallowed by the misted barn,
sucked by the peristalsis of my fear that he had gone,
leaving nails for souvenirs.
But he was there still.
I saw no sign.
He hung as before.
Only the wind had risen
to comb the thorns from his fur.
I left my superstition
stretched on the banging barn door.
