A gray fox sits and stares at the speaker, calm and almost holy, yet it is clearly sick. That clash drives the poem: the fox looks like an angel, but the foaming mouth suggests rabies, so beauty and danger arrive in the same image.
The middle stanza seems to turn away from the scene. The speaker snaps that they won't write another poem about "the goddamn crows," which sounds tired and a little irritated, as if the usual nature subjects have become clichés. Yet the poem is still reaching for something from the natural world, and the outburst feels like a way of dodging a harder feeling.
That feeling returns in the last stanza. Holding a rifle is compared to holding an infant, something fragile that you're afraid to set off. The poem never says what happens, but the mood is tense and uneasy. The speaker seems caught between tenderness, fear, and the grim possibility that the fox must be killed.