Urban Foxes

Urban foxes
visiting each night.
A neighbour feeds them,
puts out bowls of food. Expensive food -
and so, of course they come.

Same lady nurtures cats.
Half feral and her own.
Cat and fox devise routines;
avoid each other
like two plagues.

Another neighbour keeps a dog
it loves to bark at foxes.
Incessantly.
With boy soprano bark -
and fear of foxes?

My daughter met a fox
confronted its two eyes
in total darkness late at night -
it having
cat-flapped in.

Weird sounds the foxes make
like babies crying. Times enough
more boy soprano than the dog.
The copulation finished,
they fail to disengage - I'm told.

So are they truly urban when
their homeland is a park -
the sort with cattle, deer
a golf course and a house -
forget the flowery kind?

And after death their spirits wander back
to lodge among the trees.
I see them etched in bark
or curled around a gnarl.
One runs along a branch

but mostly they look out
on where they used to live:
a head or face with paws.
Though one is stuck -
its tail is all I see.