Fewer peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes each time you check,
the last big mess of beans,
the last full tray of romas,
one perfect unexploded chestnut,
the blooms from below
visit us briefly
in the air up here.
Posts Tagged fungus
Final fruits.
Sep 6
New year walkabout.
Jan 3
Doesn’t matter what I think,
some bear’s been shredding them.
Peck and peck. Repeat.
How much wood? You cannot imagine.
Several layers interlaced living on decay.
More and more, the moss beats back the grass.
The extent of it is new and puzzling.
Evergreen mountain laurel leaves are the thermometer of the woods.
At 43°F they look like this; warmer they lift and flatten;
colder they curl, tighter and tighter, into little tubes at zero.
And here is 25°F, this morning.
Walkabout in wonderland this afternoon.
Happy New Year!
Mushroom meditations.
Sep 22
Some emergent mushrooms are pulled up by the moon.
Some by the sun.
Or Mars.
By Venus.
Or by an Angel.
Some tough and chewy, grapple on for the long run.
Some are social, aligned like the seats in the balcony.
Curtain rising, caught between my shadow and the sun.
Death comes, from Pluto, in the end.
But the flies and beetles and the microbes settled in for a week of feasting.
Up for a while, down for a while,
before long, up again.
Transformed, not ever ended.
We wondered, when we first walked the trails here below the Little Sandy Bald,
if the blocks of quartz we saw every three or four steps,
pebble size to boulder size, clear and rosy and cloudy,
held rubies or emeralds inside,
or sapphires, the fancy forms of quartz.
Walking on jewels; we still are.
Quartz with veins.
Most fungal entities are brief,
pop through the soil for a week
then begin immediately to decay.
Lichen shelf.
But some harden and settle in for the long term.
And become habitats themselves.
New variety.
90º around the trunk,
slipped sidewards in time
comes a fresh beginning.
Ooze of birth.
The Jain swish the path before their steps
to insure they don’t crush a bug.
I’m less moved by bugs, but hate to find I’ve crushed one of these.
Just looks phallic.
Or a family of these.
Loam cardinals.
Or even one of these.
Just one.
Not this.
Member of extended family.
Not these.
Spore bomb.
Or this one.
Just one of these, a hole to breathe or blow.
The parent organisms live underground,
safe from my steps,
busy being the synapses between tree roots
powering the internet of trees.
Really: this is fresh-made science.
Be thankful God does not spend all his time deciding softball games
and litigating kidney stones.
Inside the grand circle of mountain ridges, inside the circle of trees that ring the grass, an abundance of pretty little things.
Beneath the ironwood tree, a fungal family up-reach through the ivy.
Marching order.
But at each center of the tanish, beigeish disks, a spot of blue.
Blue, why blue?
Our snake this week was a third the length, a quarter the girth, a fiftieth the mass of last week’s blacksnake.
A little garter garden guarder.
Two foot of pure, well, snake.
Looking both ways, tongue forked and flicking, smelling me.
Forked tongue tiny.
Between the snake and the tomatoes a pile of brush.
What’s not to lich?
Digesting slowly.
Glad to be coral, in full rut; as shameless, if a bit more delicate, than a baboon’s butt.
Gladolia, hereabouts.
Garden guarders, like the garter, may be verygolds.
Don’t stare directly at the fractals.
So nearly stepped on, just inside the kitchen door, a chevron,
an inch and a quarter, weirdly well drafted.
Joan of Arc’s shield?
Not impressive as a flyer, kind of a stumble flutter.
Fearless symmetry.
But eclipses my poor powers.
