The Patron Saint of Suburban Foxes

The morning’s dressed in what would be
a gaudy filter if this were a photograph,
but the greens of the lawns and crape myrtles
really are that green, the blue of the sky and jays
that blue. Her own orange, though, deepens
in shadow to red, like condensed autumn,
and makes her almost invisible
against the brick she edges past
on her burnt-matchstick legs
before choosing speed over cover
and bolting straight up the street, igniting
a comet tail of confusion, then wonder:
the bleary-eyed, not-yet-caffeinated,
still-pajamaed, stiff-legged witnesses
fetching the dew-softened paper or peering
out the kitchen window as they wash
the remnants of last night’s dinner from the pan,
or those of us who just stare at the day, hoping
it will start itself, all wordlessly asking, Is that . . . ? 
then declaring, It is! It’s something like belief 
that she gives us without knowing she gives it,
an echoing urge to look around—maybe
it lasts the day, maybe just a minute—to see
the marvelous appear again, not out of nowhere,
but from the ordinary, where we know it hides.