Folk Tale

Chelsea Woodard

for Nonny Hogrogian

In the story, I remember a hungry young fox

rendered in pastels. He has stolen

from a strict-mannered woman in town, his tail's been cut off, his lot

cast to repay her: stomach still swollen

with her Guernsey cow's milk, his head hung

as he trudges the sad route she has mapped

for him. In the story, I remember bright sun

glaring, the fox hunched and tailless, his tongue lolling, lapping

at air, his shame-path dry and sorrowful.

And reading, I knew the author had lived

in our house -- rust-colored shutters, fall-

wormed, rattling rose hips, frost, pewter-halled air.

And in the book, every page held a trade: a pail

bartered for rare, lazuli beads, a brown-speckled egg

for milled grain, straw for the mule pulling

the plow. And I knew that each time, the fox had begged

for their pity -- a sack of clean down, a gold coin, a gift --

and that he'd at last made it back, the cold pail

handle clenched in his teeth, milk sloshing the step

of the stern woman's house. And I pictured the blood-matted tail

handed back to him, dragged over our slab-granite walk,

smelled the freezing ground

swelling -- stumbled with apples, damp now, half rotten --

the author's fingers rust-smudged from the work,

mine smeared with the chalk dust we found

decades later on baseboards and rimed sills of doors --

the fine powder set into skin, each tenuous history

heart-learned, unwritten.