Vixen

Headlights glinted in a pair of mischievous eyes
before the fox turned, disappearing behind her own tail
and into an overgrown field, the tenebrous skies
falling heavy over the blackened backwoods vale.
Headlights dimmed and died and the man stepped out,
gazing across the glass, darkly, of a reed-riddled pond,
and walking down from the dead-end lane’s turnabout
toward the driveway, and to the farmhouse beyond.
The house was large, old, three storeys tall
and its porch had but one outside light shining
to glow across the porch, peeling back the pall
of Night as it weighed upon the horizon’s lining.
Each window was a skull-socket in that half-lit facade—
all but one on the top floor, in a far corner where
a single foxfire candle burned; and so, with a nod,
the man approached the tree that stood parallel there.
As he looked up he remembered her freckled face
and her pink lips as she had waved goodbye,
riding her bike away from his much-maligned place
after promising a taste of her wild strawberry pie.
He had watched her while his blood burned and rose,
Lust a devil that had taken to rutting inside his head
and he grinned like an ape to think of her clothes
torn to reveal strawberry-and-cream flesh outspread.
So he climbed the oak, rising with a lust-feverish grasp
on branches and twigs and even the bark’s scales
until, at length, he came to grab the hot window clasp
and raised it, hearing, for the first time, fairy bells.
“I’m comin’ in, darlin’,” he said, his breath lurching
as he gazed into the candlelit room, his grin so wide
that he looked like a beast upon that branch, perching
like a Nightmare astride a dreamer with nowhere to hide.
He was so startled when the rifle met his eager eye
that he lost his grasp and fell from that tall tree,
tumbling headfirst into his final bed, to forever lie
while a fox laughed, as a girl, with glee.