Outside, night has shaken its sleeve.
Moths mob the street lamp,
dozens of tiny mandibles tear and munch.
The Montgolfiers of the dusk
have been tricked away, replaced
by the moon’s full, stippled grapefruit.
It balances on the wall at the end of the garden,
almost within reach. Look –
you start to say, and at the same moment

a fox appears, picks its way along the wall
through ivy and ivy-leaved toadflax
and enters the moon
and stops, stands inside it

like an outline of a fox, a weathervane
that on the current of our indrawn breath
turns its head towards us – at that,
you’d whisper if you dared make a sound, at that.