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That book, It Must Be
a Misunderstanding,

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will be coming out later this
year from Copper Canyon Press.

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So now I'll read some of my
own poems from Twice Alive,

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and I'm going to have to
repeat a little bit of some

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of the introduction
that Allison gave just

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because I think it's helpful.

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This is the author's note in
the beginning of the book,

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but many of us learned
about lichen in high school,

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that it's an indicator
species for pollution,

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and litmus, in fact is
derived from lichen,

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and that it's the synergistic
alliance of a fungus, an algae,

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or cyanobacteria, is pretty
much true, but it's simplified.

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Lichen ecology
seems to have more

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to do with collaboration than
competition and collaboration

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is transformative with lichen,
which may be more related

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to animals than to plants.

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The original organisms
are utterly changed

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in their compact.

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They can't return
to what they were.

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And according to
Anne Pringle, one

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of the leading contemporary
mycologists, with whom I

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had the lucky opportunity
to collaborate,

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it may be that
lichen do not, given

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sufficient nutrients, age.

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Anne and other
contemporary biologists

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are saying that our sense of
the inevitability of death

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may be determined by our
mammalian orientation.

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Perhaps some forms of life
have theoretical immortality.

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The thought of two things
that merge mutually altering

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each other two things that
intermingled and interactive

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become one thing that does
not age brings me to think

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of the nature of intimacy.

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Isn't it often in our
most intimate relations

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that we come to
realize our identity?

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All identity is combinatory.

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