WEBVTT

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"Twice Alive."

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"Mycobiont just beginning
to unwrap photobiont,

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each to become something else,
its own life, and a contested

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mutuality, twice alive.

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Algal cells swaddled
in clusters.

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You take a three-lens jeweler's
loupe to inspect the hold fast

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of the umbilicate lichen,
then the rock tripe lichen,

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then the eirenic
Amanita mushroom,

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swarming with a kind of
mite that has no anus--

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then the delicious chanterelles
called trumpets of death.

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Supreme parsimony
in drought lets

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lichen live in
sporadic events of dew

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and fog, a velvety
tomentum and a wet thallus.

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I crush oak moss
between finger and thumb

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for its sweet perfume,
persistent on your skin

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when I touch your throat
so slow to evaporate

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the memory of seeing sunburst
lichen on the sandstone cliff.

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But if herbivores eat
wolf lichen, they die.

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And if carnivores eat it,
they die writhing in pain,

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with the exception of mice.

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It is rarely possible to tell
if lichen is dead or alive.

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The fuzz of fecal dust
from carnivorous mite

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triggers wood cutter's eczema,
the bane of loggers knee

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deep in sweet ferns,
sawing down cedar.

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So evening finds us
at this wood's edge

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where, at a dead oak's base,
shoe string rock glimmers.

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Its luminescent
rhizomes reflected

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from the eyes of a foraging
raccoon that doesn't yet

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sense us.

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Air ghostly and damp clings
as we step from our woods

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to look across the field
toward the first lane

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of lit houses, their dull pewter
auras, restrained by wet haze.

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Cordyceps-- the brown of
your eyes softened with rain

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and remotely fluorescent--
dissolve into slime

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after a few days.

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Whatever we thought we were
following was following us.

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Its intention
unlinked to our own.

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So that sequence is divided into
three parts through the book.

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So that's just the
first part, and--

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