From Dragons, which will be published in March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

A fourth grader sees the fox
skulking behind the Climatron
as something from the rural past,
Reynard, the sly antagonist
of Chanticleer and gingerbread,
ghostly tip of tail for wit,
fur waistcoat immaculate.

But foxery is futurist,
a whiff of what’s upwind, a knack
for slipping past apocalypse.
When all intention fails, the fox—
which never had a human use—
will revel in irrelevance,
rolling in the uncut grass.