Blood blister over my thumb-moon
     Rising, under clear still plastic
     Still rising strongly, on the rise
Of unleashed dog-sounds: sound broke,
       Log opened. Moon rose

     Clear bright. Dark homeland
Peeled backward, scrambling its vines.
     Stream showed, scent paled
In the spray of mountain-cold water.
       The smell dogs followed

In the bush-thorns hung like a scarf,
       The silver sharp creek
     Cut; off yonder, fox feet
Went printing into the dark: there,
        In the other wood,

  The uncornered animal’s running
         Is half floating off
Upon instinct. Sails spread, fox wings
      Lift him alive over gullies,
     Hair tips all over him lightly

    Touched with the moon’s red silver,
        Back-hearing around
The stream of his body the tongue of hounds
    Feather him. In his own animal sun
      Made of human moonlight,

     He flies like a bolt running home,
Whose passage kills the current in the river,
  Whose track through the cornfield shakes
      The symmetry from the rows.
   Once shot, he dives through a bush

        and disappears into air.
       That is the bush my hand
    Went deeply through as I followed
Like a wild hammer blazed my right thumb
       In the flashlight and moonlight

         And dried to one drop
    Of fox blood I nail-polished in,
      That lopsided animal sun
       Over the nearly buried
     Or rising human half-moon,

   My glassed skin halfmooning wrongly.
Between them, the logging road, the stopped
         Stream, the disappearance into
        The one bush’s common, foreseen
                   Superhuman door:

               All this where I nailed it,
   With my wide’s nailbrush, on  my finger,
           To keep, not under, but over
My thumb, a hammering-day-and-night sign
                       Of that country