The title promises a hunt, but the poem delivers a puffball, and a spent one at that. Instead of the prize, the speaker finds an empty shell and a friend's note about things that cannot be seen. The poem's central idea is that the line between living things and human machinery is thinner than we assume, and that nature keeps its best things hidden from us.
It opens with a fact, not a landscape: "Fungi are like us— / absorbing oxygen, releasing CO2." The register is that of a science lesson, right down to the chemical formula, which looks oddly blunt on a poetic page. The two participles, "absorbing" and "releasing," make breathing sound like a business transaction, with materials taken in and waste sent out. The next line then jumps: "This puffball is an abandoned factory." The grammar has moved from simile ("like us") to flat metaphor ("is"), as if the comparison has hardened while we weren't looking. The poet never explains the link, but a factory also takes things in and puts things out, usually through a chimney. Respiration and industry quietly become the same process.
The second stanza turns to action. The speaker "nudges" the "intact wall" with "the point of my umbrella." The umbrella suggests damp weather, which is my inference from the object, and it is a mild, slightly comic tool for a scientific investigation. "Nudge" is gentle, nothing like a smash or a stab. A ripe puffball lets out a cloud of spores when touched, and the cloud looks like smoke, which is what the factory metaphor depends on. Here, though, nothing comes: "It's all out of smoke." The line borrows the rhythm of idioms like "out of steam" and "out of luck," and it describes a building whose walls still stand while the inside has been used up. There is also a small buried chime. "Wall" and "all" echo each other across the stanza, the only near-rhyme in a poem that otherwise avoids rhyme, and it lands on the word that means total emptiness.
The form is three tercets in free verse, and the lines get shorter as the poem goes on. The longest line is the second of the opening stanza, with its list of gases. By the last stanza the lines are fragments: "writes a friend." "Impossible to see." The poem slows like a walker who keeps stopping, and the effect is of a mind running out of confidence at exactly the moment it should be gaining it. The tone stays dry throughout, and the humour depends on the speaker never laughing at himself.
The final stanza changes voice. "Ovenbirds and the black morel, / writes a friend" reads like a line from a jotted note, a bird and a mushroom put side by side. Judging by the pairing, they belong to the same season or stretch of woods. The inverted "writes a friend" works almost like a quotation mark, handing the poem's last word to someone else. Ovenbirds are woodland birds heard far more easily than they are seen, so "Impossible to see" fits them well. It also fits the camouflaged morel, and the speaker's own failure to find one. The sentence is ambiguous about whose it is, the friend's or the speaker's, and that ambiguity helps it echo backward. The oxygen and carbon dioxide of the first stanza are invisible too, and so is the smoke that has already gone. The poem is full of processes that happen out of sight, with only their leftovers on view.
Its significance lies in how much it fits into so little space. It refuses sentimentality about nature and treats a mushroom with scientific bluntness and an industrial image. It also quietly admits the limits of looking. The phrase "like us" makes one more reading hard to avoid: if a puffball is a factory that has run out of smoke, then any living thing is a factory too, running on borrowed time. The poem never says this, and it leaves the thought at the end of a short line, as unseen as the morel.