Fox Bark
It was cold, too quiet for a mouse,
The only living was outside the house
The old man heard it in a world snowed white:
A fox bark, a faint heartbeat to the night

A lean and wintry barking, echo-thin,
It went up the hill and down again,
It came from less than half the heat inside
A child that walks by chair-rungs, one-year wide

Yet that cup of blood, that slender heat
Was all there was outside there to defeat
Those old archangels of unfruiting snow,
Silence, chaos, and the dead moon's glow

The old man sat up straight, his mind unfroze,
the sound pierced like a needle through his doze;
He recalled his running, young and slim,
and death once drawing back afraid him.