One image carries Dave Bonta's "Rabid": an angel that foams at the mouth. The poem is only nine lines long, three tercets, and each stanza works like a separate snapshot of one tense encounter. The central idea is that tenderness and danger are not opposites here. They sit in the same gaze, and even in the same pair of arms.
The first stanza sets the trap. "The gray fox sat" is short and calm, almost the opening of a fable. The second line stretches out, "and gazed at us like an angel," and the sentence seems to rise toward something holy. Then the dash drops us: "one that foamed at the mouth." Everything before the dash is serene and everything after it is disease. The title has already warned us, so the surprise is not that the fox is sick but that it can still look beautiful. Its stillness is the unsettling part. A rabid animal that simply sits and stares is more frightening than one that snarls, though the poem leaves us to feel that rather than explaining it. The sounds help. "Gray" and "gazed" are hard and glassy, while "fox" and "foamed" share an *f* that goes soft and wet, as if the line itself were starting to froth.
The second stanza swerves. "I refuse to write / another poem about / the goddamn crows." It is the only place the speaker says "I," and the voice is irritable and tired. Crows are such a familiar shorthand for death and gloom in poetry that the speaker is clearly sick of them. The joke is that the poem names them anyway, so the refusal becomes the thing it refuses. The swearword also lands right after "angel." "Goddamn" has "God" inside it, as if the poem has caught itself being too heavenly and answered with a curse. There is some self-criticism here too. The speaker scolds the habit of turning animals into omens, yet one stanza earlier the fox was turned into an angel. The poem seems to know it.
The third stanza brings the weapon. "Holding a rifle / is like holding an infant, / wary of setting it off." The poem never says what happens to the fox, and it never explains why there is a rifle. We infer the situation from the stanzas on either side. The simile is startling because a gun and a baby seem to have nothing in common. What joins them is the way you hold them: carefully, with the weight in the crook of the arm, afraid of what a wrong movement will start. A baby can be "set off" into crying and a gun into a shot. The ending mirrors the opening. In stanza one something deadly was made gentle, and in stanza three something deadly is held like something gentle.
Structurally the poem is free verse. It has no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines are short and plain. It is as compact as a haiku, though it does not follow a 5-7-5 count (the first stanza runs roughly four, eight, then six syllables). Each stanza closes on a heavy, final word: "mouth," "crows," "off." The last of these is the most telling. The poem stops on "off" with the trigger unpulled, in the held breath before any decision. We never learn whether the fox is shot, spared, or simply left to its sickness.
That refusal to resolve is what makes the poem worth reading. In nine lines it manages three things many longer poems avoid. It lets an image be beautiful and horrifying at once. It admits that poets are tempted to turn every animal into a symbol. And it declines to tell us how to feel about the choice that faces the people holding the gun. A reader who finishes it is left in the same position as the speaker, looking at the fox and not sure what to do next.