Losing a Cat

We have a thin fox, ghosting the house.
Inside, a form floats quiet floor to floor,
its footfalls softer on the wooden treads,
each week, than the weeks themselves
tread on us. For now.

A fox indoors. Have we never asked
what it surrendered that lives between trees,
moonlight, tiny wicks of breath, rootlet eyes,
ghosts of food in a hunter’s blood-tuned nose?
Disappearing with age, it seeks familiar chairs
where a tail curls to lick its orange head,
nearly red, and we see the fox in cat.

The shape of the skull and its dreaming
are round as ours. All our lives, we too
have rotely chased our own quick things,
trapped in instincts. The fox lived inside
our captivity narrative, but could not tell.

When it goes, we will point at the window
and say, “There, there he dreamed…”