Home Range Nocturne

by Sam Morley

Somewhere up on the hill, Sellotape

straps carnations to street saplings

there are big painted letters on the road’s

camber where the boy was pack hunted

and his stabbed heart lost its air, hardening

from a thin glow to flecks of tar.

I never walked that pavement’s buckle

I turned before his loose-leaf shrine

and the boy with pools at his feet stayed

out of reach under a slice of streetlamp.

As I went on, words jabbing my tongue

were depletion and squander and waste

they covered the field of this wine

dark morning where I walked my pup

in rags of night, twitching at every Frog-

Mouth landing and leaving with its haul.

If the words turned then to absence

there was surely something present

bopping between tallgrass, parting

pond reeds, the vixen’s pelt flaming up

embankments loose with clay stone.

And when the blades of its eyes flashed

strobic to my gut, its stainless steel

unblinking, its trot struck out toward us.

I waited, watching as my dog (with no wild

left in it) had no sense that dying

has a definitive snick and downwind the pad

of predation came calm, two fox stars

meant only for those caught seeking.

So I stayed my right to bloody an animal

the word I longed for then was question

asking each flare of hair, each twitch-wire

what is the value of running or staying

when the whoop of a killer comes.

And that thick arm of fire-tail drifted out

then in in the sparked air between, turning

to find another tear in world, staying low

to the ground and spiriting toward that hill

drawn to something silent before light

before the day’s promise and its peril.