The Wake

July morning, white sky fat
with the planet’s condensed breath,
bay slick as oil, the quick red fox
slips her nose into the shallows
and slides a mollusk from sanctuary.

A dance and toss, a swallow, and in dusk,
under cotton sky on hard soaked sand, I attend
the last moment of a razor clam.

I breathe. Without a glance she turns and trots
toward the raw new house on the bluff.
A leap into saw-grass and gone.

And then the dawn.