mycobiont just beginning to en-
wrap photobiont, each to become
something else, its own life and a
contested mutuality, twice alive,
algal cells swaddled in clusters
you take a 3-lens jeweler’s loupe to inspect the holdfast
of the umbilicate lichen then the rock-tripe lichen
then the irenic Amanita mushroom
swarming with a kind of mite that has no anus
then the delicious chanterelles called Trumpets of Death
supreme parsimony in drought
lets lichen live on
sporadic events
of dew and fog, a velvety
tomentum and the wet thallus
I crush oak moss between finger and thumb
for its sweet perfume persistent on
your skin when I touch your throat, so slow
to evaporate, the memory of seeing
sunburst lichen on the sandstone cliff
though crustose lichen relish
decay, vagrant lichen go all
hygroscopic, spores spurting
out through walls split
at the invagination fronts
but if herbivores eat wolf lichen they
die and if carnivores eat it they die
writhing in pain with the exception of mice
it is rarely possible to tell
if lichen is dead or alive
the fuzz of fecal dust from
lichenivorous mites
triggers woodcutter’s eczema,
the bane of loggers knee-deep
in sweet fern sawing down cedar
in the presence of water, photobionts go turgid
in hours of dark respiration, a spermatic green-corn smell
takes the shape of a lamellated mushroom
in cavitating symplasts, spores loosen
into the elongation zone on a night of caterwauling loons
so evening finds us at this woods’ edge where
at a dead oak’s base
shoestring-rot glimmers, its luminescent
rhizomes reflected from the eyes
of a foraging raccoon that doesn’t yet sense us
air ghostly and damp clings
as we step from our woods
to look across the field toward the first
lane of lit houses, their dull pewter
auras restrained by wet haze
cordyceps—the brown of your eyes softened
with rain and remotely fluorescent—dissolve
into slime after a few days, whatever we thought
we were following was following us, its
intention unlinked to our own
if that’s a mass of black jelly fungi
on the rotting pine branch, if that’s a thumblong
translucent eggsack pulsating behind the termite queen
if the rising sun through the blinds wakes us together or
will tomorrow, if witch’s butter could learn to speak
long soft sarongs of moss
ensorcel rocks treestumps up-
lifts of granite and gneiss
pine needles blackberry brambles
arching up wet and tousled
as we descend a scrub hillside
our breath visible in flighty morning
air, we enter the forest of quaking
aspen, spongy ground
on either side of the path riffled
by creamy edible morels and
poisonous false morels song
of moss under our breath before you left
you said Don’t be so rational, electronics
are rational and I wondered what change
I might make that my next words not be so
then your telegram of tiny black mosquitoes kept me awake
all night on the porch I could hear big moths
before I saw them when finally I laid down in the huge space
your absence left me, the cat pawed my chest
while your towel with its sour smell muffled my face
while I’m dogged through the day by quick sniffs of
sickness, the sorghum-thick snot insists
I too am a fleshy protuberance risen momently
from some tangled mycelium so the dead also
speak when I speak oh holy holy communion
then the getting tired happened
then the white-flecked brown pigeon
flattened itself into the sand, some force
expresses us before we can name it
fragrance whelms from incense-cedars
maculas of light fallen weightless from
pores in the canopy our senses
part of the wheeling life around us and through
an undergrowth stoked with the unseen
go the reverberations of our steps
as we hike upward mist holds
the butterscotch taste of Jeffrey pine
to the air until we reach a serpentine
barren, redbud lilac and open sky, a crust
of frost on low-lying clumps of manzanita
at Redwood Creek, two
tandem runners cross
a wooden bridge over
the stream ahead of us the raspy
check check check of a scrub jay
hewing to the Dipsea path while
a plane’s slow groan diminishes bayward,
my sweat-wet shirt going cool
around my torso as another runner
goes by, his cocked arms held too high
Cardiac Hill’s granite boulders appear
freshly sheared Look, you say,
I can see the Farallon Islands there
to the south over those long-backed hills
one behind another a crow honks
the moon still up over Douglas
firs on the climb to Rock Spring yellow
jackets and Painted Lady butterflies
settle on the path where some under-
ground trickle moistens the soil
I predict you’ll keep to the shade of
the laurels to nibble your
three-anchovy-slices-over-cheese
sandwich while I sprawl on a boulder
in full sun sucking a pear
the frass of caterpillars tinkles onto beds of dry
leaves under the oak where a hawk alights
with its retinue of raging crows we are prey to the ache
of not knowing what will be revealed as
the world lunges forward to introduce itself
clusters of tiny green dots, bitter oyster,
line the black stick held in your hand, weak
trees leaning into us as if we were part
of the wet dark that sustains their roots
under dead leaves and that Armillaria
since honey mushrooms suck from
the soil chemicals that trigger a tree’s
defences, they leech the tree’s sap
undetected all the while secreting toxins
to stave off competing species
but in the inseparable
genetic mosaic of their thin
root filaments the identity
of any singular species blurs among inter-
active populations, twice alive
near the summit, a gleaming
slickensides outcrop
sanctifies the path winding
through a precinct of greenschists
whose lethal minerals sterilize the ground
the hum of some large insect
Immelmanning around
our heads calls to mind,
you tell me, the low drone
of a Buddhist chant
but now we really hear chanting
we can’t decode—Don’t
be so rational—a congregate speech
from the redtrembling sprigs, a
vascular language prior to our
breathed language, corporeal, chemical,
drawing our sound into its harmonic, tuning
us to what we’ve not yet seen, the surround
calling us, theory-less, toward an inference
of horizontal connections there at
ground level, an incantation in-
dependent (of us) but detectable, consummate
always resistant (to us) but inciting
our recognition of what it might mean
to be here—among others human and not—
here, home, where ours is another of the small
voices taking us over, over ourselves
over into the nothing-between, the out
of sight of ourselves, a litany from
spore-bearing mouths as
hyphae stretch their long necks
and open their throats opening
a link between systems
a supersaturation of syntax
an arousal even as slow-
rolling walls of high-decibel
sonar blow out the ears of whales and
fires burn uncontrolled and
slurry pits leak into the creek, etc.
etc., femicides, war, righteous
insistence and still
and still the lived sensation fits
into the living sensorium, can’t
you hear?—Don’t be so
rational—the world inhale?—hear
the call from elsewhere which
is just where we are, no, even
closer, inside us inside the blood-
pulse of our bodies, the bristle of
our mosses, the embrace—, and exhale