Foxes

In the dark I typed foxes mating
            since this is the instinct of our times—

returning to the home screen, how waking from sleep
            pulls out the glow of it—the first call

was low, desperate, a gorgeous cry. It was answered.
            Another, near as, knowing the sound.

I pressed my face against the screen,
            the open window, where the moon shone

as if she, too, wanted to see them:
            foxes filling the night. I moved

through the first page of answers,
            blue and intimate, considered that foxes

mate in December through February—
            what you’d call winter, which this isn’t,

though let’s accept we’re past that: seasons
            happening when they should.

This year, lawmakers can’t decide about turning clocks,
            if maybe the days should be longer,

to feel we’d made the most of them. Hours—
            another name we give to what we can’t keep;

what we sing and stumble to hold onto—
            I let the phone go dark. I listened

to a pair of foxes; the ask and ask and ask
            of their soft, screaming bodies, marveled

first of all that it was happening,
            the urgent making, more of us.

And then, also,
            that I could hear it.

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