A Thought-Fox

SHIP'S LOG: A loves receiving packages from far-off places. After another sleepless night, it was wonderful to find a charming ceramic fox necklace from Lou Mary Lou and Tom Holt's May Contain Traces of Magic in the post. 

I'm off to sleep (at 2 in the afternoon, haha) so you might like to read some Ted Hughes (now known primarily as the husband of Sylvia Plath, but I think he's a much better poet). Voila, "The thought-fox" from the Critical Quarterly, 1984:

THE THOUGHT-FOX

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

You can read more about Ted Hughes on critic Richard Webster's site here.

So what's your favourite vulpine story? Or are you less fond of Reynard and more a fan of Puss-in-boots?