[Matt Q]

Absorption

Before the fungus killed me
I spent a long time in the woods
On all fours with my tail in the air
Practising moving like a fox
Listening to the crunch of dead leaves
And climbing only those trees
That would have me

No one warned me about the fungus
No one warns you about things like that
And so I didn’t see it coming
Almost all of it was hidden underground
Branching chains of memory
Communing with itself
Humming

There are worse ways to go
Lonelier ways
I became part of a song
Woven into the tangled pathways
Of a woodland saga
With no heroes or monsters
I still wish I had become a fox

But no one ever gets their first choice
And this too is transformation

.

[Jim Moonan]

.
Quickly in to say I like it; an animated entropy. What we don't see kills us or we eat ourselves.

The lines that brought the whole thing to life for me are,

I became part of a song
Woven into the tangled pathways
Of a woodland saga

Btw, in the last line, one is has gotta go : )

.

[James Midgley]

Hi Matt,

I've been sitting with this one since you posted it and trying to work out what to say about it.

I like the deadpan, slightly naïve style which is both sweet and melancholic. I like the choice to capitalise the line-starts and leave off on punctuation, and how the linebreaks sit on natural phrase-making pauses to better accentuate this and guide a reader.

Within that framework, lines that might feel empty of content like 'No one warns you about things like that' work well to modulate the pacing. There are options for cutting, but I had the feeling that I was quibbling to a point where it was no longer helpful. Maybe 'of a woodland saga ... monsters' took me out of the poem the most.

That said -- the poem doesn't work satisfyingly enough, for me, to stand alone. Its referents remain vague (what fungus? why are you practising being a fox? why did you want to become a fox? etc), and the deliberate simplicity of the language doesn't give any imaginative interaction there either (except that it is genuinely charming). It also means I don't really know how to pitch my readings of some lines. In a larger context the final two lines here might work just fine, bouncing off conceits in other poems, but here they're too vacant.

I say it like that because I imagine this is a sibling poem to the other foxy pieces I've seen you post? What I've seen and what I remember are poems shot through with the creeping apprehension of decay, perhaps due to illness, of death (one kind of transformation) in lieu of growing towards a different stage of life (and in the direction of desire), and ponderings on the viability of ideas to do with rebirth. Anyway this is all to say that this poem as it is might sit perfectly well with friends and not need much of anything done to it because it can rely on those other poems to flesh out its contextual freight -- but I'm not really sure what to say about it on a workshop forum and/or without accompaniment!

I enjoyed the poem with those other poems roughly in mind -- but it might not be one to send to a journal without backup and whathaveyou. Thanks for the read.

[David Callin]

I like this one as it is, Matt, but I wonder what it would be like if you focused only on the fungal experience. Does the fox detract from that? Is the fox really necessary?

I'm prepared to be persuaded that it is.

Cheers

David