Claire Taylor, Understood by the Mama Fox, 2019 (Artist Website)
Watercolor and gouache
Giclee print available here
Only fragments of the story remain—
lamp, stone, smash, wall, head, ash.
I don’t know where I was when I learned it—
where the blunt fist was born. Where the rage.
How memory stores its knives for later use.
The places the briars go, their little snags.
All the hurt like a tangle of thorns,
and no way through but through. Even the house,
with its panes of glass, with its metal blinds tied
with a cord—a weapon. When did I begin to flinch?
I found my solitude beneath the sawn-off blades
of oaks, a small circle away from the grief of razed fields.
Away from the sun’s eye, I became the fox. The woods
and their cool floor, my cheek to the dark and shadow.
Drawing the earth with my finger. The stone coming.
Says the stone in my ear, you were born here. A seed spent
in darkness, in dreams. If only you can remember the sound.