[Matt Q]

.
Hallmarks (R1)
.

When is it too late
to send a card? –
when the cancer reaches the brain?
At death? A decade later?

It’s one thing to see roadkill,
another if you knew it
when its homeostasis was intact

From the window of my concrete box
I watch
two splashes of auburn
against the grey,
a vixen and her cub,
sunbathing on a garage roof.
These two I love.

Inside the concrete box?
Another box?
................... A body’s surely not
a box we hide inside
dressed up as one more box – and yet,
we come unwrapped.

Dr Shannon, Dr Weaver, please:
sender or receiver –
who is a card really for?

The vixen might be last year’s cub.
The cub is next year’s fox.
And I’m still not the me I used to be.
But let the foxes change
My love will not –

and what does one write
inside a card?
.....................I never know.



----

Swapped S1&2, moved original S4 to below new S5, removed the original's S5&7
S1L4 "a few days later"-> "a year later" -> "a decade later".
S5 cut "won't you tell me"
S6L3 added the word "still", took it out again





.
Hallmarks
.
It’s one thing to see roadkill,
another if you knew it
when its homeostasis was intact.

When is it too late
to send a card –
when the cancer reaches the brain?
at death? a few days later?

From the window of my concrete box
I watch
two splashes of auburn
against the grey –
a vixen and her cub
sunbathing on a garage roof.
These two I love.

Dr Shannon, Dr Weaver,
won't you tell me please:
sender or receiver –
who is a card really for?

Foxes come with baggage –
“wily”, “cunning” – mine
are innocence perfected.

Inside the concrete box?
Another box?
................... A body’s surely not
a box we hide inside
dressed up as one more box – and yet,
we come unwrapped.

Inside my own baggage:
a bag I never look inside.

The vixen may be last year’s cub,
the cub is next year’s fox,
and I am not the me I used to be.
But let the foxes change,
my love will not –

and what does one write
inside a card?
.....................I never know.
.

[Jim Moonan]

.
This is softer, more melancholic than most poems you write about animals, your dwelling, and such. There was a death, to be sure. But beyond that I don't know whose death it was. At first it appears to be obvious. But then there's a rumination over the card (of sympathy?), when to send it, what to write in it, and I think again about what or who has died — and I'm not so sure it was a fox. But I've read it through just once. So these are first impressions. I'm looking forward to more readings.

I did note the analogy of the house and body being boxes that contain the N. I always look forward to that kind of surprising perspective you tend to insert into so many of your poems. The rooftop is present...

The only thing that caught my eye was the "wily". I immediately thought Wile E. Coyote because off my cartoonish childhood. Maybe "sly" would work?

What is different about this story from others that you have painted is that there is no clear closure to the poem. Instead, I'm left feeling the N is in a state of suspense triggered by the death of someone or something. I'm probably reading it wrong but I just wanted to get that out there before I go back and discover what the poem is really saying — Ha!

It now occurs to me that the poem might be being wily in it's telling...

.
.

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Matt—

I really like this poem. I’m not quite sure what to make of the “concrete box.” I’m imagining that the speaker is a wildlife biologist studying the foxes from a concrete blind—the “concrete box.” Alternatively, the speaker could be visiting a terminally ill friend or relative in a hospital room—the “concrete box”—that overlooks the garage roof where the vixen and her kit are sunbathing. The speaker meditates on the impermanence of our physical existence compared to the permanence of love. How can a something as ephemeral as a card express the permanence of love? We never know what to say to grieving or dying people, in speech or written in a card, because we are really speaking to ourselves, and we know how false our reassurances are. Even so, love, beyond words, is eternal.

I especially like the image of the box (the body) within a “concrete box” (whatever that is), which will come unwrapped, revealing, I suppose, the gift of the soul.

Fine work.

Glenn

[John Boddie]

Matt - It's an interesting poem with the foxes and concrete boxes. A couple of things to consider:

"homeostasis" looks like grandstanding. In any case, it may be stable, but I doubt it could ever be regarded as "intact." If you wanted to keep "intact," you could simply say "...when it was intact."

If you dropped S4, you'd eliminate a speed bump in the narrative with no damage to what remains.

JB

[John Riley]

Mart, I like this but will have to come back to critique. It’s 12:50 a.m.

[W T Clark]

You might — if you were me — consider reversing the first and second stanzas.
I think the poem is very connotative but it feels loose. It comes off more with a vibe than a snap. The progression is off: I think: there is an art to non-coherence (variation) and to cohherence (progression) and it feels as if this poem cannot quite decide whether it wans to move in variations, box, card, body-box, the speaker's love for the foxes death-life. There is, confusingly, only the spirit of death here: there is no actual dead thing despite the gesturing to cards and the the coffin-creek of concrete box: and I can't help feel as this makes the poem a little misty, a little indefinite; if the speaker were actually in a coffin, the narrative might feel less vaguely ethereal. The love of a dead thing for the soon-to-be-dead seems more pressing than the love of a symbolically-dead-like-thing. You might — if you were me — also consider ending on "and I am not me I used to be".
Hope this helps.

[John Riley]

Matt, I've been struggling to comment on this. I can't determine if there is something in the structure I'm not seeing or if it needs to be rearranged. Do I need more to connect to it? I don't have to convince myself I understand a poem to appreciate it. I love poems I can read again and something new is revealed. I don't think that will happen if I reread this one.

I don't have a problem with the loose structure but I think it needs to be rearranged. I don't know how to do that. I get that impression reading. The mingling or intertwining of animal death with human death, life inside a concrete box, can be made more effective I think. You've received some strong specific suggestions. Maybe there are things there you can use.

John

[David Callin]

Hi Matt. I did wonder about "homeostasis", but I think you're making a wry joke at yourself by using such a grand word in this context. (I think the title might be a similar thing.)

I don't think I understand how all the parts of the poem are connected, but I like the juxtaposition - and intertwining - of the foxes and the medical case. Quite a lot, actually. It seems both touching and intriguing.

So I like it.

Cheers

David

[John Riley]

Matt, generally what I tried to say is this doesn't feel connected enough, or finished. More needs to be done to make it feel complete.

[Yves S L]

Hello Matt,

As a step 1, I am just curious to see what happens when you put similar riffs together, as the most vanilla way of structuring the poem, and as a point of comparison to what you actually chose to do.

I

When is it too late
to send a card –
when the cancer reaches the brain?
at death? a few days later?

It’s one thing to see roadkill,
another if you knew it
when its homeostasis was intact.

Dr Shannon, Dr Weaver,
won't you tell me please:
sender or receiver –
who is a card really for?

and what does one write
inside a card?
 I never know.

II

From the window of my concrete box
I watch
two splashes of auburn
against the grey –
a vixen and her cub
sunbathing on a garage roof.
These two I love.

Inside the concrete box?
Another box?
  A body’s surely not
a box we hide inside
dressed up as one more box – and yet,
we come unwrapped.

Inside my own baggage:
a bag I never look inside.

Foxes come with baggage –
“wily”, “cunning” – mine
are innocence perfected.

III

The vixen may be last year’s cub,
the cub is next year’s fox,
and I am not the me I used to be.
But let the foxes change,
my love will not –



So basically, I think of this poem as four riff-clusters that you mashed together, and the issue is whether the riff-clusters look like satisfying poems on their own.
Of course, this is just a starting point for how I would deal with a poem constructed like your poem. The incoherence, to me, is interpreted relative to what coherence would look like on the level of riff-clusters. Question 1: is the riffing even interesting as it is?

Q2: Just rearranging the riffs into riff-clusters, I see a cross-riff, the love motif. Do you need to created more of these cross connections? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Well, part of the added layer of incoherence is that there is a slight connection sometimes. Example of an added cross-connection (love-motif):

Dr Shannon, Dr Weaver,
won't you tell me please:
sender or receiver –
who is a card really for?

For someone that I love?

Q3: Also, in the above vanilla version, it is obvious that [i]sometimes[i] you start developing an idea. Like inside the whole container riif of II, you start to develop the sub-riff of baggage, and as you start to develop it, you leave it. Could you be more consistent or inconsistent with this?

Yadda, yadda, yadda, more analysis, yadda. You get the basics of what I am saying about how to think about structuring, right? There has to be some reason why the version above gets rearranged into another form. Yeah!