The Gray Fox

Someone I know is dying, at seventeen.
When he visited last Thanksgiving
he wore with an adolescent's joy
the black leather jacket I lent him.

Around us spring happens: a crocus
among the gravestones, plum blossoms
that open in a single night.

Already ivy twines the fencewire
and last year's path through the field
is lost in the thick green of new grass.

It would be good to be the gray fox
that trots to pond's edge, spots me
and stops. All winter he's hunted here,
undisturbed, and now he watches me
watch him, ten yards away, unafraid.