Foxy

by Tarquin Landseer

A shrill cry like hurting, this eerie bark
from out of the dark repository of her soul,
voiced like the wail of someone violated.
It sets my hairs on end and peering through the curtains,
a shape shifted and shrank into the shadows.

All night she preyed on my mind; all week she set me on edge,
hiding behind the privet hedge; leaving her streaky menses
up the garden path amidst the entrails of ripened fig fallings
and love-lies-bleeding.

I saw her skulking suitor snuffling through the begonias,
cocking his hindleg on my purple berry bushes.
One night I left the door ajar and soon she came calling.
Alive between the times of dusk and dawn,
nosing about with brazen eyes ? a fiery fox-girl in disguise.

All those yawling yelps which I surmised as cries for help,
a ruse as she arrowed a message, tightly aimed at my desire.
Hopping onto the sofa in her diamanté coat,
diamond-damp with rain, I poured her half a measure and
said: 'You smell velvety, of Amaranthus'.

In front of the hearth she became a flame, a totem bringing favours,
dispensing fire; her twitchy ears filled with a language of signs.
She curled up her loamy feet under the brush of her tail,
leaving a blood be-spotted trail. Nuzzling in beside me,
wilful waif, stark and pliant with wildness, her wine-dark
tongue tasted my sapid skin.

With kindled sparklers I stroked the ache within,
taking in her flaring fur and her vixen's blurry gaze.
All around us the room seemed to flicker ablaze
as we sought a sympathetic magic ? between the rainfall and libations.

Judge's Comments - Roger Elkin

Where Orange Day Parade is written in unrhymed tercets albeit with the opening and closing 3 lines split like brackets into a one-liner followed by a couplet to give the poem a structural symmetry that echoes its contents, Foxy is in free verse paragraphs of irregular length which chart the poem's argument. Like the slugs, this "vixen" "fiery fox-girl in disguise" "became a flame ... / dispensing fire". Throughout the poem, the writing is sensuous and sensual, from the opening line's "shrill cry like hurting" "like the wail of someone violated", through the recognition that "all those yawling yelps" were "a ruse ... tightly aimed at my desire" and the exquisitely descriptive last sentence of the penultimate verse-paragraph rich with alliteration and precisely-imagined detail, to the final acknowledgement of "the ache within". This is confident writing, but let down by the uncertainty of tenses - the continuing "sets" (line 4) becomes a contained past tense in the rest of the poem; and the (unnecessary?) reference to "her skulking suitor" in verse-paragraph three undermines the serious sensuality of the main protagonist.