September morn

It is such an incredible September morning - it was cool when I got up, cool enough to close the windows. So typical of mid-Autumn, yet it's only the first of September. There's also a quietness in the air along with the coolness and deepening shadows - I only hear the crickets singing now, no birds.

I think this mushroom is a type of Amanita. I don't think it's edible; I don't think it's the hallucinogenic type of Amanita, either. With this cool weather, I expect to see them around more. Perhaps, too, I'll see the faeries that hang out with them!

And as the seasons come and go,
here's something you might like to know.
There are fairies everywhere:
under bushes, in the air,
playing games just like you play,
singing through their busy day.
So listen, touch, and look around
in the air and on the ground.
And if you watch all nature's things,
you might just see a fairy's wing.

~Author Unknown~

I call them Fungi Ravioli!

In this moist season,

mist on the lake and thunder
afternoons in the distance

they ooze up through the earth
during the night,
like bubbles, like tiny
bright red balloons
filling with water;
a sound below sound, the thumbs of rubber
gloves turned softly inside out.

In the mornings, there is the leaf mold
starred with nipples,
with cool white fishgills,
leathery purple brains,
fist-sized suns dulled to the color of embers,
poisonous moons, pale yellow.

Where do they come from?

For each thunderstorm that travels
overhead there’s another storm
that moves parallel in the ground.
Struck lightning is where they meet.

Underfoot there’s a cloud of rootlets,
shed hairs or a bundle of loose threads
blown slowly through the midsoil.
These are their flowers, these fingers
reaching through darkness to the sky,
these eyeblinks
that burst and powder the air with spores.

They feed in shade, on halfleaves
as they return to water,
on slowly melting logs,
deadwood. They glow
in the dark sometimes. They taste
of rotten meat or cloves
or cooking steak or bruised
lips or new snow.

It isn’t only
for food I hunt them
but for the hunt and because
they smell of death and the waxy
skins of the newborn,
flesh into earth into flesh.

Here is the handful
of shadow I have brought back to you:
this decay, this hope,
this mouthful of dirt,
this poetry.


Mushrooms
~Margaret Atwood~