That book, It Must Be a Misunderstanding,
will be coming out later this year from Copper Canyon Press.
So now I'll read some of my own poems from Twice Alive,
and I'm going to have to repeat a little bit of some
of the introduction that Allison gave just
because I think it's helpful.
This is the author's note in the beginning of the book,
but many of us learned about lichen in high school,
that it's an indicator species for pollution,
and litmus, in fact is derived from lichen,
and that it's the synergistic alliance of a fungus, an algae,
or cyanobacteria, is pretty much true, but it's simplified.
Lichen ecology seems to have more
to do with collaboration than competition and collaboration
is transformative with lichen, which may be more related
to animals than to plants.
The original organisms are utterly changed
in their compact.
They can't return to what they were.
And according to Anne Pringle, one
of the leading contemporary mycologists, with whom I
had the lucky opportunity to collaborate,
it may be that lichen do not, given
sufficient nutrients, age.
Anne and other contemporary biologists
are saying that our sense of the inevitability of death
may be determined by our mammalian orientation.
Perhaps some forms of life have theoretical immortality.
The thought of two things that merge mutually altering
each other two things that intermingled and interactive
become one thing that does not age brings me to think
of the nature of intimacy.
Isn't it often in our most intimate relations
that we come to realize our identity?
All identity is combinatory.