fox hunt
even in death it’s about having the biggest obelisk
fox beneath the sourwoods of south brooklyn questions cemetery meanings
the stones of dead mayors a vile conglomerate still scheming in rot
fox feels offended where can one go to watch the scarlet tanagers
without the strong-armed intersection of bureaucracy most of us can’t afford a mausoleum
many of us will be wrapped in gauze and tossed into the communal pit the rest ash-subjugated
or banefully boxed even in death there’s nary a place to lay one’s head
maybe fox is merely a pathos and if truth resides in darkness we must feel our way there
remember a catacombs is also a document so many indelible scoundrels
and only now have we begun to punish their effigies even in death fox thinks even in death they displace me
fox hunt
a fox friday is more like tuesday morning when all the rifles are locked up in westchester
there’s no crowd at the met so fox surreptitious by nature can sidle by the egyptian wing
up to the second floor enormous room of rooms where he encounters the oil massacre of his many bodies
it’s the only time fox can loosen his tongue enough to wail openly his cries echoed by the empty chamber and returned to him charged and contrapuntal
foxes don’t know a lot about history but neither do painters which makes for a dramatic exchange with very little subtext
there are no fox memories only instincts and so fox doesn’t stress for significance but threads his tapestry of behaviors which does the meaning for him
it looks a lot like learning but corporeal like altering blood flow or optimizing digestion with only the intimations of stillness
by the time the crowd arrives fox is long gone besides it’s friday the eagles are high on the hunt their nests left empty and ample with eggs
fox hunt
fox does not strive to be indelible but impresses himself briefly against the signals[1] of his passing
stein may have been slick with her rose tautology but the rose has never considered stein
and has kept rosing and unrosing through time’s exhaustive shadow despite attempts to reify its roseness
a fox language is like a rose language except hungrier[2] the stakes much higher in his plucking
he knows everything is meaningless that cannot sustain the day and how pretentious to die empty like a signifier
no one has written a poem in a fox language spicer was maybe closest when he said (as if there were nothing on the mountains but
what nobody wanted to escape from) which is the best we can hope for fox with no reason to tell us anything
[1] a fox language is not a gibberish or a glossolalia not a marker of meaning but an instinctual taxonomy
[2] for what use is a word that doesn’t fill you up nomenclature is a breadless winter fox could never survive the dictionary
Eric Tyler Benick is the author of the chapbooks I Don’t Know What an Oboe Can Do (No Rest Press, 2020) and The George Oppen Memorial BBQ (The Operating System, 2019) as well as a founding editor at Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of chapbooks. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Vassar Review, Entropy, Mount Island, No, Dear, Reality Beach, Ghost Proposal, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.