And I'll read two other poems.
This poem is was in poets.org for Poem of the Day,
and I asked Jane if she'd read it with me,
but there are so many hard words that we
decided that it would be a little better if I stumble
through it.
So when mom had to be moved from our house,
I thought about her furniture and all of that,
but I also thought about her garden under the ground
with the mycorrhizae talking to each other--
the mycorrhizal net.
And yesterday in our ecopoetics class,
we were talking about the mycorrhizae.
Hyphal tubes, symbionts, exudates,
glomalin proteins, pre-soil, prevent the leaking out.
Fluttered root tips of padded prickly pear,
sand under anxious days, enzymes, gill ghosts,
patched necromass under her clothesline,
keep spirit close.
Beneath feldspar, redbold mica.
Nets of roots, fate-kept not-death fungal sheets,
steady there, abiotic mediators, ones toward all.
Crawling now whirred opened cells,
Pleistocene N-rich molecules where rhizosphere
stayed still.
Days of salt, stomata, pores in leaves.
Dirt with furry prizes turned zero clouds
where chores were done, to branch near places
she had moods, mendings.
Sewed buttons on.
Ectomycorrhizal fungi, mend her there.
Her here.
Mend moods here.
Pink and beige, mold moods, stay
the feet.
Forgetters, spun threaders where dots
and arcs host sugars.
Ampersands of storage compounds,
Weaving loves.
Carbon allocators micro-essays
of endomycorrhizal dappled net of never-seen, don't.
Light carriers, don't forget,
fungal tracers, hold back below.
Tubes and branches, microbe niche of ground,
don't forget her, earth that held her up.