Dorothy Gilbert Fox Woman Thoughts on two prints by Yoshitoshi and Hiroshige She turns away. Her little boy, his hand on the brown train of her kimono, stares at her comfortable back, her swirling garment, his face all trust. No shadows there, no knowledge; stay, he says. Play. In that warm room of trunks and screens, rectangles, floral silks, with only a tumbling vine to hint at vagary in nature, how's he to know life's to be one goodbye after another? Here she has lived all these years, in this house, with this husband, a human being. He rescued her, a vixen. Her young fur's sheen had caught the eye of hunters in dead orange grasses. She led them, looped them, did her best to dizzy them, but they wore her down, closed in, when suddenly he rode up, scattered them all, and scooped her to his saddle. Shaking, weak with gratitude, she turned into a woman; that was the real ambush. Oh, he was stunned by her beauty, but not long; a quick man with his instincts, he knew her gift. At home, he gave her silks, paintings, even a small dog, and a koto. She learned to play brilliantly; the notes hung like fruit above their heads. He'd praise her, tell her stories of human history, wars, treacheries, honor beyond death. He'd guess her thought and praise it, too, touching her shoulder. A pair of hunting spirits, they started thoughts from the mind's dim thickets, together sensing paths, traces . . . He stroked her hair, her stomach; she leaped; one animal, they spoke the speech. In that space, that den of themselves they'd hollowed out of nothing, what were names, labels, captor and captive? Years passed. The son grew, walked. And then, what whiff woke her? Swamp spring, perhaps; newborns' damp fur, the salt of it; sweet earth, sweet grass? Histories of sex, dusty or fresh; odors of the movement of blood; the pulse of fear in the doomed? Fox-barks in the swamps, the phosphorescence of her kind, the nights, the reeds, the crying? The part of her still in the room is woman; robe, obi, hair dressed in splendid loops. Past the threshhold her face is lost to us. Behind a screen her profile's shadow lengthens, strangely proportioned: fox nose, fox ears, fox leg and paw— She goes to kitsune bi, the glow in the night meadow, the foxes all communal, casting their fatal light, luring a man from his safe way on the road to town, drawing him into the marshes of longing and terror and of course, loss. |
with apologies to Bertha Lum |