Fire leads to the other central theme of the book, alchemy—a process of transformation wherein base metals are heated—struck by fire––and cooled. The book is divided using the names for the seven metals of antiquity used in alchemy—lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, silver, mercury. Part of the natural science of alchemy was to turn base metals such as lead into noble metals, such as gold. In the gold section of the book there is only one poem, ‘Forty Desert Days and Nights in White’ (81–88). Each section of the poem is named after a place and accompanied by quotes from Anne Carson’s Plainwater (1995) in the right margin. The first one begins at “Ouyen Caravan Park,” and with the Carson quote: “Beautiful the nerves pouring around in her like palace fire” (81). This gold part of the book is where the fire has been leading. Gold contains the most fire, it is “is a receptacle of elementary fire,” as Gaston Bachelard writes in The Psychoanalysis of Fire—after which ‘Goats Cheese with Honey and Rosemary on Toast on a Sunday Morning’ is written (1964: 72). The speaker travels from Northeast Victoria, at Ouyen Caravan Park, where her nerves start “pouring around in her,” up through Western Australia towards the Northern Territory, towards the heat. Through travelling she becomes less fixed to her identity. “At the Breakaways outside Coober Pedy,” the speaker thinks:

How can I not-I.
Paint the changing light in a desert sky at sunset.
Better not try.
Better just sit and let.
Every particle shimmer the jet colourless. 

(83)

Kocher writes in the notes at the end of the book: “The question I set myself when I began this book may well have been: ‘In light of this task set before me, which I take as the task to love, how am I to live?’” (135). It seems that living happens in these poems only through love. There is no answer, no true knowledge, that Kocher arrives at in terms of how to live, rather, each moment of loving goes towards something that turns into nothing—“We are [O]. / Touching fingertips whose hearts mutually [Yes/No]” (87). Kocher reaches the gold, the prize, the thing, but this thing is slippery and hard to pin down. Gold is not the end, there is nothing that will solve the problem of living, even if you work out how to love.

After the gold section comes copper: ‘Implosion,’ “smells like a radio” (91). After the bliss of travelling, and reaching the gold, comes a return to the domestic space—stagnation, depression. In ‘Ode to Sludge,’ Kocher writes:

[…] You’d think dogs and sunshine
just the antidote required to fight
this bone marrow ache that sits like an unwanted 
relative at the end of the bed demanding
tea, vodka, cake. Too Late.
This one’s a real carcass.

(93)

But pretty soon this depression goes through an alchemical process and is converted into something else. The cake isn’t demanded anymore it’s offered: “The universe is the bride of the soul.¹ / Like chocolate. All the pretty cakes and all the pretty horses turning south” (101). The cake, like the speaker, and like many repeated words in the book, undergoes what Jamieson Webster, in Conversion Disorder, calls “endless conversion” (2018: 185). This is also how Webster describes the process of a psychoanalysis, where a symptom is converted only to be converted again. In this book Webster turns to Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire, too, to describe the process of endless conversion in psychoanalysis: “The changes wrought by fire cannot be simply material or ideal; they are changes in substance, pure movement, the play of forces” (2018:184).

In the third poem in the book, ‘Not the Horses,’ back in the lead section, Kocher writes:

not the horses, but their heartbeats.
not the houses, but the stumps.
not the river, but the damming.
not the fire, but the coal.

(21)

Even the fire here, the central element of the book, is given over to coal. Endless conversion is only made possible by interrelation. This means that as soon as you start talking about one thing you are talking about something else. The speaker of Foxstruck affirms her existence by undergoing endless conversion, by tracing the changing meaning of words as they are put together, as they are alchemised through the power of association. The fox leads us to fire, always changing, which leads us to gold and coal, but these respectively ideal and material substances are only introduced to be brought back into new forces of interrelation and movement. In this book, everything gets a bride, and the soul’s bride is the whole universe.