POETRY

Fox Heart

By Adrian Blevins     Reprinted with permission from University of Georgia Press
Vertical Divider
                        There is no La Leche League
in the Appalachian rain forest in my heart. There is
no Gap, no Eileen Fisher, no Wi-Fi, no Dollar General.
But for five hundred million years at least there was
enough chestnut & littleleaf sneezeweed & Carolina parakeet
for everybody in the Appalachian rain forest in my heart
& in actual reality plus megatons of satiny swarms
of freshwater mussels the pearly shells of which
make good ashtrays & southern bog lemming
& woodland bison & elk—& elk—plus actual
passenger pigeon & certain kinds of big-eared bats
& shrews. But the freshwater mussels these days
like the wild leek & the mountain alder & the piratebush
are turning to an invisible blur in the old rivers
 
                  of the Appalachian rain forest
in my heart & in actual reality not to even mention
the shrimplike crayfish they'd dare us to swallow live at 4
to prove what hillbillies we were & how much we loved
the forest & everything already dead & dying in it.
So of course I stood there on stage in that hunting lodge
& shut my eyes to imagine the gray fox also in my heart
& in reality as the fox is one of the high priests of all this listing
by which I just mean the main gumption behind it
mostly because she's still flourishing in her sly den
with the scattered bones like a fenceline outside
since she's too busy not to be messy & far too hungry
not to sleep all day & hunt all night & too maternal
& sneaky not to steal chickens for her pups
 
            & too curious not to stare at everything forever
to discern it. The gray fox can even climb trees & is therefore
also part coon & cat & I do mourn the mountain lion—​
I remember as a child the bobcat's call—& do I mourn
never seeing a flying squirrel or a star-nosed mole
or a bog turtle or a diamond darter or a spruce-fir moss spider
& hate not even knowing what a hellbender is, but still
I stood there on stage in that 4-H hunting lodge
in my beloved Blue Ridge at the age of eight & shut my eyes
to call up the gray fox hiding out in a little den in the shadow
of my hillbilly heart to get the guts to open my mouth
& swallow that crayfish live so I could learn I think
to bide my time till I could sing this story of our unforgivable sins
& try & say what a fierce little forever-thing at least our sorrow is.

GRAY FOX

Urocyon cinereoargenteus

Habitat and Range: Forests and forest edges in North America, Canada to the Pacific, Central America, and south to northern South America.

Description and Notes: Silvery gray-brown to reddish brown and weighing less than twenty pounds, the gray fox may be the oldest fox species in the world. It was certainly once the only fox found in the eastern mountains. Now it competes with the introduced red fox (Vulpes vulpes) for food and territory, though the gray fox prefers the shelter of deciduous forests, in contrast to the red fox’s more cosmopolitan range. The two are often indistinguishable in the field. The tail of the gray fox, however, is sleeker and blacker than that of the bushier-tailed red fox, may have a black stripe, and has a black tip instead of the red fox's white. What truly distinguishes the gray fox is its ability to climb trees with its catlike semiretractable claws, jumping from branch to branch and descending cautiously backward down a trunk like a housecat. During the day, it might den in a hollow tree many feet above the ground or in a brush pile or an abandoned burrow. The gray fox is omnivorous, and its diet varies by habitat. In the Southern Appalachians, it eats everything from berries and other fruit to birds, rodents, and cottontail rabbits. This feline-seeming member of the dog family typically lives near bodies of water, where, unlike a cat, it appears to delight in swimming.


A Literary Field Guide to
​Southern Appalachia

University of Georgia Press