Dowsing

Dowsing 

and first you need a live Y of hickory…
and after a time you'll feel your eulogy
in your wet, wet feet       

Never having felt the roots

of his hair he scrapes and pulls and rubs

against the head of each

follicle that falls…  he holds up against

the panegyric glow of the kerosene's  moat,

a broken halo, a jaw on the white

white page, a fox jaw he’d seen once

as a boy, black on white and bright wet

red against the snow and the sprung closed

trap he’d leaned into a day, maybe, before,

to set…and still fire wonderful that coat,

his ungloved hand buried to the pimply skin.

And the cold the stiff cold scorched him—

because he’d expected warm maybe—

a broth or a tea, but she, the swelling belly...

and his awe was driftwood in winter, was crushed

under the cove of his diaphragm,

until the thaw, until some mercy opened his mouth,

the way spring let go or seemed to let go

all at once and that very same caught log

was pulled into the ebb of the tide like all the rest—
because what do you say, standing at the periphery 
of twelve white boxes?

but it wasn’t like that, it was never like that—

dowsing sermon words—eulogy words—it was at first 
the nose of the vixen sniffing the air and coming up

to that moss covered trap and leaning in and snap!

up off the plate, that fast, so what’s sprung

is sprung but the getaway is more marvelous,

is pure grace, is a grin across that golden grass

he wanted to see when he was nine, when that tail,

swallowed by the hillside was just that, not the snow,

not the black goon closed on a nose, a mouth,  a toothed

muzzle, chewing words, and no sound, hell no, not a yip

or a wheeze.