A Fox For Forgetting

A fox twitches his nose amongst
the forest floor of papers.
He may discover something other than lists,

but lists are all he said
in his odd grunty breath
smelling of leaf-mould and carrion.

School reports: "He plays around when well", "rides on past glories", copper-plating common-place. A Brooke Bond book of rockets with blank squares. Battle of Britain tracings, half a Spitfire fighting a noseless JU88, there a Jerry bales out. Orders of battle for unfinished armies for continuing wars. Ink-and-watercolour sketches of troops for a winter-war on a winter world in a universe where half-formed, heart-incomplete heroes swagger. The cold bleeds desire into pillowed snow. Airfix soldiers - 25mm of anonymous venom - with plastic bayonets meeting faceless opponents.  A black mask, heavy padded jacket, a red-buttoned foil. A notebook half-full of half-understood concepts, half full of unformed sketches.

The fox shivers, cocks his leg against
a telegraph-pole on the hill.
The grey wood becomes dark red

Large blue-backed A4 notebooks, still heavily scored with pencil, adding up, in their book-keeping likeness, to: clear plastic legs shifting crabwise across a chart pointing a wandering spider-thread of cocked hats, large brass compasses following heavy pencil tracks, a filigree of fathom-lines, speckled cluster of soundings, cracked etchings where rocks slumbered, blotches of sand yellow and candy blue, boxes where ships clustered, black and white calculator with bright green lights, black 40X50 binoculars, smooth with adjustment. Hiding under the rubbish, still in their cellophane wrapping: white socks, white shoes, white shorts, white short sleeved shirts, a conductor's cap for a Nr 54 to Aintree, two (blue) epaulettes with single stripes, each a knot. A cheap dark blue officers jacket, with brass buttons, gold half-stripe and loop on each arm. Yellowed fire-plans with black yellow and red lines, cooling veins of fire-lines wrapped by oil arterials. Red blotches for fire extinguishers. A banana boat being towed into Wellington Harbour. They could have chosen Auckland.

It's by the crash that the fox
pauses looking for sustenance
amongst limbs. He gnaws a finger contentedly.

Hidden under the boxes and the life-jackets  and the red foul-weather gear, the shoe boxes with X-acto blades, cotton reel paint tins winked open, encrusted with last year's dove-gray non-specular blue paint, sheets of plasticard and skeletons of injection-moulded models still hung from square frames. Boxes of books on fighter aces, wars and colour schemes. Sheets of decals: a complete set of of safety markings for a Phantom F4B, yellow and black Hornet tail markings for a F8 Crusader. A Phantom II with it's upraised wing and down-slanted fins, large tail-fin tailor-made for the red-and-white rays of the Sundowners, dove-gray upper surfaces, pristine gloss-white belly inset with white AIM9E missiles with their delicate red-rings. In it's cockpit, a detailed control panel, a Mark 2 Martin-Baker ejection seat with a pilot, G-suited, helmeted and masked, straight ahead for his next mission.

Down in the valley, men prowl.
Fox barks a dark pink froth.
He must find a place before night-fall.

Legal cases in blue-laid paper written in the pen du jour. A clear hexagonal Biro, sharp-tipped yellow Bics, gleaming green Pentels with snubby ends, hard cylindrical covers, sticky-out clips and colour coded U's of thin plastic that flipped off at the vital when discussing legal platonic enlightenment. Good to gnaw and scrub across the page in a pedestrian manner, likewise Westward Ho! in tone about incompetent master mariners and crooked owners and worse ships in 3.30 Atlantic Stakes with culpability of hands flickering case-law and paper-weight regulations and acts of god enabling small tissue men to meander amongst dark-brown polish seats. I glimpse the fox in the glow of the tall stacked bookshelves, a gold-red streak across rows of gold-and-brown books. Thumbed corners where blood dribbled and dripped. A thesis, where all is mulched, trodden into an indigestible gloop of paper, worthy of door-stops and fire-lighters.

Up here, the fox looks down on the hawk
who cleaves the streaming clouds.
Farms hunch themselves against rock.

Fox lies down. He spreads gently on
the short grass. In his dream,
a hawk tears his bright flesh.