And the first line explores that question. In fact, the whole 
first stanza sets it up, economically placing the reader 
in time and space, Late evening in November’s suburbs, 
a light rain, and introducing the poem’s triggering subject,
an urban fox, scratting for scraps in the bin-bag black.

Next, a stanza of rich description, all glittering tarmac
and streetlamps haloing the night. The fox’s coat is pictured 
as the hot-chilli pelt of three-day-old kebab, the bloom of rust 
on iron railings. Smell is often under-rated, so, He is the musk 
that marks alleyways behind the houses’ dreaming backs.

Now, something needs to happen (and a little soundplay 
wouldn’t go amiss here, a tinkle on the piano keys), 
His brush-tailed cry slashes a trail through star-hushed skies. Then 
it’s all action, action, action: Nothing slinks like him, nothing 
bites and slices, nothing ruts and gnaws and stinks like him.

There’s enough figuration so that we know it’s a poem 
we’re reading and not some other kind of text, not 
a takeaway menu, say, or a knock-knock joke. About 
two-thirds of the way in, there’s an epiphany, No-one 
sees as he sees. His flaming eyes sear the dark, and the poem 

swivels away from a wry and slightly weary exploration 
of its own mechanics into something more unconscious,
more emotionally charged. A fear of — yet desire for —
the wild, the unknowable, is never stated but it’s everywhere 
from this point on, There is no-one so alone, alive, awake, alight.

Then a final image, a piece of metaphorical surprise, 
concrete yet suggestive. Clunky exposition at this stage 
would entirely derail the thing. As the poem dies, we’re left 
only with the noiseless, savage page, No-one rips flesh 
from the silence as he can — yes — even to its clean, white bone