Kelly Gray
A Picture of a Fox
It is a fox traversing the forest floor, under downed trees, past the ghosts of your hands, the ghost of your saw. Last season, you cleared a fire line 400 feet back, letting in light, a place mushrooms might grow in the fall. Thicket and bramble pulled out by the bushel. Not that you could bushel such a thing, but it was a haul, all the dead forest, fed to the mouth of the chipper. We stood around watching the machine do the work of digestion. It gave back mulch, us half bored by the return to the earth, our hands in our pockets. The next morning, I woke in your studio, the soft smell of paint and double worked canvas. Your windows faced west, the cut of sun working up the hill to meet the sky.
Now, she is running in a straight line across this view, legs blurring, body clear. Had we been at the beach looking at her tracks in wet sand, wondering about the tracks of small dogs, I would have said, ‘The dog is foolish because they do not know they have been here before. They run in circles, they bound, they zig zag. But the fox body is constructed from millennia. She has transformed from individual into the essence of ancestor. A tree climber, she drags bones into boughs to mark her territory. She runs straight, rarely surprised.’ You would agree with me, and I would have felt like I said too much.
Now, there is a golden orange orb of a Robin’s body tucked into the fox’s mouth. Her ears press back to listen to what she cannot see. Her attention is two brained and literal; what is behind me, what is in front of me. She moves through your work, naturally low to the ground, towards the abandoned home up the hill. She has birthed under floorboards five kits with blue eyes. If the bird is still alive it will give its last moments to essential lessons; pounce like this, bite down like this. My attention is shattered, I am not the ghost, it is that I see ghosts.
When I look at pictures of you, I think of your chest like this forest. The work, the handprints, the places people have grasped, leveraged bodies, laid heads. The dogs you have loved with their broken backs, the wheels constructed in lieu of legs. The places you could not let a thing die, pulling out lessons in your mouth.
The photograph provides a window. You are always so careful with views. You bleed each painting into being so that the onlooker can firmly step from their world into yours. I take a step towards you, paper or canvas is of no consequence to me. I look forever at pictures of you. Your mountain of a body offering a place for me to run, not with curiosity but as a millennium, straight, with a bird in my mouth to feed to my young. I have been here before. I do not stop to smell you.
Kelly Gray is author of Instructions for an Animal Body, Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife, and My Fingers Are Whales & Other Stories of Cetology. Recently, her work has appeared in Northwest Review, Trampset, and Passages North.