It’s Tuesday, July 25th, and after the seige of rain we’ve had over the past few days it feels SO good to have a sunny dry day ahead. Here’s a poem I wrote a while back after a different stretch of rainy days when I guessed mushrooms would be abundant in the nearby woods.
In search of strangeness I slow walk uphill, pines, birch, maple, ash my August companions. Old wooden basket on my arm, eager to gaze on late summer fungi. Some may be edible, some could be poison. Childhood fears of strange plants rise— crossing the street to avoid huge turning sunflowers, horror of gray creeping mold on an orange, corn plants so thick and tall they sliced my arms. Yet mushrooms aren’t plants at all, more animal, like us, unable to make their own food like the self-sufficient rose and cabbage. This does not comfort me.
Suddenly they’re everywhere— some lacquered red with orange gills, others rust-orange, stems pure white. Now a cluster of thin-tubed pipes, beige-skinned, less than three inches tall. Here’s an eight-inch stem with umbrella cap, two ruffled yellow dancers, gills striping down stem, a pair of dry, thin-skinned beings, caps’ beige texture like best kid leather gloves, delicate skin collar protecting bleached coral gills.
But whoa, four moon-blue creatures, round-edged glowing biscuits, pale, squat, assured among pine needles.
All along the downhill path tiny dark red mushrooms, stems wiry, emerge like imps, shorter than a red eft’s length.
The twelve little newts I’ve seen among the pine needles are just as strange. Poison or sweet, cousins all.
