"Twice Alive."
"Mycobiont just beginning to unwrap photobiont,
each to become something else, its own life, and a contested
mutuality, twice alive.
Algal cells swaddled in clusters.
You take a three-lens jeweler's loupe to inspect the hold fast
of the umbilicate lichen, then the rock tripe lichen,
then the eirenic Amanita mushroom,
swarming with a kind of mite that has no anus--
then the delicious chanterelles called trumpets of death.
Supreme parsimony in drought lets
lichen live in sporadic events of dew
and fog, a velvety tomentum and a wet thallus.
I crush oak moss between finger and thumb
for its sweet perfume, persistent on your skin
when I touch your throat so slow to evaporate
the memory of seeing sunburst lichen on the sandstone cliff.
But if herbivores eat wolf lichen, they die.
And if carnivores eat it, they die writhing in pain,
with the exception of mice.
It is rarely possible to tell if lichen is dead or alive.
The fuzz of fecal dust from carnivorous mite
triggers wood cutter's eczema, the bane of loggers knee
deep in sweet ferns, sawing down cedar.
So evening finds us at this wood's edge
where, at a dead oak's base, shoe string rock glimmers.
Its luminescent rhizomes reflected
from the eyes of a foraging raccoon that doesn't yet
sense us.
Air ghostly and damp clings as we step from our woods
to look across the field toward the first lane
of lit houses, their dull pewter auras, restrained by wet haze.
Cordyceps-- the brown of your eyes softened with rain
and remotely fluorescent-- dissolve into slime
after a few days.
Whatever we thought we were following was following us.
Its intention unlinked to our own.
So that sequence is divided into three parts through the book.
So that's just the first part, and--