Fox Stole
—on seeing at last, in my parents’ wedding-party photograph,
what my furrier grandmother wore that day
Whole white arctic fox, your pelt
wears a swoon of gardenias,
the big mother-of-the-bride corsage
Nana has pinned into your spineless back.
You’ve come to my parents’ wedding
bringing the fur of a snowstorm, a white-out—
your limp and pliant body a far-north tundra
inside the banquet room.
You’re folded at your mid point over Nana’s arm,
hind and front legs dangling their dark claws,
that high loft of winter fur hiding your ears.
Long, long, your body is long, but nothing
prepares me for the length of your tail,
your brush—a white plume,
a dense offering bright as that sateen
of my mother’s bridal dress.
Of your face, all I can see
is your thin snout, your blunt black nose.
With your head hanging straight down, long fur covers
the emptied sockets my furrier grandfather
surely filled with two dark glass eyes.
As a little girl, I shuddered but still touched
what lay inside that small box
on a shelf in my grandparents’ Alaska Fur Shop—
glowing glass eyes of assorted sizes,
a staple of the furrier’s trade.
How could I have poured over this photograph
time after time and not seen you,
the tail-to-snout, achingly pale animal guest?
For too long—this took me
so many years my hair turned
white as your own—I’ve been
stone blind to your blinded eyes.
Innisfree 43
A Closer Look:
Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, has eight full-length books of poetry, most recently My Kindred from Salmon Poetry of Ireland. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she’s the recipient of the Holbrook Award from Literary Arts, and Willamette Writers’ Distinguished Northwest Writer Award. The Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds chose one of her poems as the lyric for a choral composition that’s now in the repertoire of the Choir at Trinity College, Cambridge. Recently, one of her poems was featured on American Public Media’s The Slowdown.