Thomas Lux

Thomas Lux was born in Massachusetts in December 1946. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon foundations, and the NEA. In 1994, he was awarded the Kinglsey Tufts prize for his book Split Horizon. The most recent of his eleven full-length collections is God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). He has both a new book of poems, Child Made of Sand (Houghton Mifflin) and a non-fiction book, From the Southland (Marick Press) upcoming in 2012. Currently, he is Bourne Chair of Poetry and director of the McEver Visiting Writers program at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Fox

My father said: Fox took another chicken last night
and scared two others to death,
and your goddamn dog never lifted his head.
Kill it. He meant the fox,
not the dog. I followed his tracks
and the small splats
of blood and brown feathers
through the snow (I was glad
it snowed, I couldn't track a moose
on dry ground) to his foxhole
near the top of a steep hill
about a half mile away; fresh, loose
dirt marked it easy among some small pines.
I knew not to go too near
and leave my scent,
so I set up a good shot thirty yards away.
I built a small wall of snow, tripodded my rifle.
When he comes out of his den again
I'll shoot the red fox dead.
Two hours later,
I hear my father call: Fox took another chicken!
I moved neither my blue finger
from the trigger nor the crosshairs
off his foxhole. Turns out, he had a back door.
In no foxhole I'd ever heard of—in movies,
comics, TV shows, school, and later, in books—
did a foxhole have a back door; no, only one door,
upward, through the roof—a helmet usually—over which,
and through which, bullets and shrapnel tore.