Alchemy

by Carol L. Deering

The fox on Riverview, beautiful
as it lay. Small pointed face,
black-tipped snout, white fur lifting
in a paw’s sweep of pathos,
its coat the colors of autumn
fading. Three magpies feasting,
its ribcage a nave.

The fox lay elegant, delicate
for days, until all carnage
rose.

_____A swoon of leaves
rides down the wind. I doze
in my den, let images spin,
editing out
the raucous birds

raising
_______my forepaws,
stalking
_______the foothills
for pinyon-spirited words.

 

Carol L. Deering has twice received the Wyoming Arts Council Poetry Fellowship (2016, judge Rebecca Foust; and 1999, judge Agha Shahid Ali). Her poetry appears in online and traditional journals: recently in Soundings Review, forthcoming in Gyroscope Review and The Kerf. She also has poems in the anthology Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region. Once she had the privilege of interviewing Richard Hugo; that interview, published by Art Notes (Columbia Basin College), was reissued in CutBank.