Fox Sleep

On a road through the mountains with a friend many years ago I came to a curve on a slope where a clear stream flowed down flashing across dark rocks through its own echoes that could neither be caught nor forgotten it was the turning of autumn and already the mornings were cold with ragged clouds in the hollows long after sunrise but the pasture sagging like a roof the glassy water and flickering yellow leaves in the few poplars and knotted plum trees were held up in a handful of sunlight that made the slates on the silent mill by the stream glisten white above their ruin and a few relics of the life before had been arranged in front of the open mill house to wait pale in the daylight out on the open mountain after whatever they had been made for was over the dew was drying on them and there were few who took that road who might buy one of them and take it away somewhere to be unusual to be the only one to become unknown a wooden bed stood there on rocks a cradle the color of dust a cracked oil jar iron pots wooden wheels iron wheels stone wheels the tall box of a clock and among them a ring of white stone the size of an embrace set into another of the same size an iron spike rising from the ring where the wooden handle had fitted that turned it in its days as a hand mill you could see if you looked closely that the top ring that turned in the other had been carved long before in the form of a fox lying nose in tail seeming to be asleep the features worn almost away where it had gone around and around grinding grain and salt to go into the dark and to go on and remember * * * What I thought I had left I kept finding again but when I went looking for what I thought I remembered as anyone could have foretold it was not there when I went away looking for what I had to do I found that I was living where I was a stranger but when I retraced my steps the familiar vision turned opaque and all surface and in the wrong places and the places where I had been a stranger appeared to me to be where I had been at home called by name and answering getting ready to go away and going away * * * Every time they assembled and he spoke to them about waking there was an old man who stood listening and left before the others until one day the old man stayed and Who are you he asked the old man and the old man answered I am not a man many lives ago I stood where you are standing and they assembled in front of me and I spoke to them about waking until one day one of them asked me When someone has wakened to what is really there is that person free of the chain of consequences and I answered yes and with that I turned into a fox and I have been a fox for five hundred lives and now I have come to ask you to say what will free me from the body of a fox please tell me when someone has wakened to what is really there is that person free of the chain of consequences and this time the answer was That person sees it as it is then the old man said Thank you for waking me you have set me free of the body of the fox which you will find on the other side of the mountain I ask you to bury it please as one of your own that evening he announced a funeral service for one of them but they said nobody has died then he led them to the other side of the mountain and a cave where they found a fox’s body and he told them the story and they buried the fox as one of them but later one of them asked what if he had given the right answer every time * * * Once again I was there and once again I was leaving and again it seemed as though nothing had changed even while it was all changing but this time was a time of ending this time the long marriage was over the orbits were flying apart it was autumn again sunlight tawny in the fields where the shadows each day grew longer and the still afternoons ripened the distance until the sun went down across the valley and the full moon rose out of the trees it was the time of year when I was born and that evening I went to see friends for the last time and I came back after midnight along the road white with the moon I was crossing the bars of shadow and seeing ahead of me the wide silent valley full of silver light and there just at the corner of the land that I had come back to so many times and now was leaving at the foot of the wall built of pale stone I saw the body stretched in the grass and it was a fox a vixen just dead with no sign of how it had come to happen no blood the long fur warm in the dewy grass nothing broken or lost or torn or unfinished I carried her home to bury her in the garden in the morning of the clear autumn that she had left and to stand afterward in the turning daylight * * * There are the yellow beads of the stonecrops and the twisted flags of dried irises knuckled into the hollows of moss and rubbly limestone on the waves of the low wall the ivy has climbed along them where the weasel ran the light has kindled to gold the late leaves of the cherry tree over the lane by the house chimney there is the roof and the window looking out over the garden summer and winter there is the field below the house there is the broad valley far below them all with the curves of the river a strand of sky threaded through it and the notes of bells rising out of it faint as smoke and there beyond the valley above the rim of the wall the line of mountains I recognize like a line of writing that has come back when I had thought it was forgotten