From the Box of the Zoo Fox

Poems by Jessica Schneider

Consciousness blinks. The star of the eye seems
to recall a swiftness into being
young. Barking at play, the kin of wild
terrain junctures to relocation whether
his willingness played or not. Now all is gone,
as captivity seasons freedom's wave.

A cage distinguishes his days as they wave,
these visitors who pass and stare. For what seams
inhabit an Arctic having now gone
artificial in glass surrounds? Being
a zoo-boxed fox, the native of chilled weather,
his sides attend a circling all the while

repetitive as dream on dream. Charging while
an earth invades an earth's enclosure, the wave
settles its grazing eye. He wonders whether
curiosity is worth this space. Seems
evolution had a trick in mind when being
planned, a pup among a mother's pups, gone

awry. Into summer now, he is too gonzo
to remember his wintered twist of interest. While
fowl and frogs plea for the wind to cease being,
the Arctic creeps to the shore's northern waives.
The sea keeps creatures moving at what sees
a city of their own demise, crisp weathered

ice continuing. For what is whither
but the orb of wander? All chasing has gone
graced, in embracing his cage at what seems
to shine. For dimness always is the wild
nocturne. There is no light, only dream that waives
under the slip of pasture and plain, a non-being

who muscles between the wheels of his being.
A cage awakens in a stir unwaived
beneath the crawled in place. All effort has gone
through glass. Nerves clutch in shadow-like vane, while
silenced in tracing, a fibrous seal
unentering, nor slipping freedom. Whether

a fox dream matters or not as real or seemed,
one cannot know in grasping for weathered
glaciers, unending worlds of world, the wild wild.