KITSUNE

NaPoWriMo #20

For today, try writing your own poem that uses an animal that shows up in myths and legends as a metaphor for some aspect of a contemporary person’s life. Include one spoken phrase.

I chose to write about the kitsune (Japanese shapeshifting fox) as “an animal that shows up in myths and legends…” I did think about the usual suspects, a dragon, a unicorn, or an owl, but wanted something a little more exotic. Plus, I have foxes on the brain as we have a fox family with at least two kits in our woods.

---

She moves the way a fox moves
	at dusk, through yards that 
	belong to other people,
	one ear tipped toward whatever comes next,
carrying that old kitsune talent for finding the seam
	between what’s offered and what’s kept,
	her whole body adjusting to the gap before 
	she’s even through it,
which isn’t myth exactly, just the thing you learn
	when staying too long in any one shape
	costs you something you can’t name and 
	can’t afford to lose,
and if she laughed when she said 
	I’ve never been where I was expected,
	that wasn’t deflection but the straightest 
	thing she’d told you all evening,
	the way a fox, crossing a road at night, 
	owns every inch of its own crossing,
before the dark takes it back, 
	before you remember
	it was there at all—leaving you
	with a warm place on the ground and 
	the long diminishing sound of 
gone.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

Start by reading the poem below, written by Carl Phillips:

Black Swan on Water

Seen this way,
through that lens where need
and wanting swim at random

toward each other, away again, and
now and then together, he moves less like
a swan—black, or otherwise—than like any

man for whom sex is, or has at last become,
an added sense by which to pass ungently but more
entirely across a life where, in between the silences,

he leaves what little he’s got to show for himself
behind him in braids of water, green-to-blue wake of
Please and Don’t hurt me and You can see I’m hurt, already.

You may not realize it at first, but the poem is a single sentence! The three-line stanzas mimic the “braids in water” in the penultimate line, and the way the lines get longer and longer also makes the poem as a whole look a bit like the widening wake that a swan leaves as it swims.

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