Vulpine Visions

If I search through old memories, shaking dust from visions long filed away, I can see scenes from my childhood. Whenever I am feeling old, I pull a few out, polish them up, and put them in a frame for a while. A constant rotation of nostalgia. They hang on the walls of my skull, eight by eleven and a half inches of glass reflecting the early morning sunlight that pours through my ears. The vision that hangs behind my forehead now shows me a scene of green and orange on a field of sandy, shell-shocked earth. The fox lived in that great floral house long before we moved in. From our deck, its joints creaking with each small step I took, I watched him check off things from his to-do list–grocery shopping, security checks, singing lullabies and other sweet songs to his children. We weren’t friendly neighbors per se, I never learned his name, but we coexisted well enough. From certain angles, he would look up through slatted wood and chitter an amicable ‘hello’ as he walked off in search of breakfast. summer sunset behind evergreen curtains– the fox