A (Gorgeous) Fungus Among Us

On Deep Looking

The thing about a poem is it asks us to slow down. For the time it takes to read it, yes, but also to move through time in a way that’s different from that to which we’ve probably become accustomed. When I read a poem I like, I am savoring. I am savoring the language, the turns, the small moments of surprise and recognition. I am savoring the way it opens up the world and makes it new. When, in “Fungus on Fallen Alder at Lookout Creek,” Ellen Bass describes the color of the fungus’ scalloped edge as:

ivory, then a tweedy russet,
then mouse gray, a crescent
of celadon velvet, a streak of sleek seal brown,
a dark arc of copper, then butter,
then celadon again, again butter, again
copper and on into the center, striped thinner
and thinner to the green, green moss-furry heart.

…I am beside myself. I didn’t know so much opulence, so much extravagant beauty could exist on the edge of a fungus, that, as Bass tells us, will soon be washed away in the next winter storm. Butter, copper, velvet. A green, moss-furry heart. Sumptuous is the word I’m looking for, a word I’ve never before associated with a fungus, but now I do. Not only in the slowed-down moment of reading the poem, but also in the years since. Impossible not to see the thin stripes as a velvet flounce of a skirt’s hem, as she describes it earlier in the poem.

It's good to be in the world. At least so much of the time. In the actual moments of it. Especially the moments of the body: the deep looking, the studied seeing, the moments we catch, on the wind, a whiff a flower we can almost name.

A good poem invites us back into the world and rewards us with fresh seeing. Often, we write to find our way back to ourselves. When I think of how to replenish myself in these difficult days for our world, I think of some lines from my poem, “Stone,” written many years ago.

Isn’t this what the mystics meant

when they spoke of forsaking the world? Not to turn our backs to it,

only to its elaborate plots, its complicated pleasures—

in favor of the pine’s long shadow, the slow song of the grass.

Or, as it were, the ruffled edge of a fungus growing on a fallen alder tree. May you find fresh pleasures in the ordinary. And poems to take you there.

Note: Bass’s poem is from her book, Indigo, and mine is from Bonfire Opera