Mushrooms in Autumn
Amanita muscaria
Now is the time of year
when walking under pine trees
you may widen your eyes
with delighted surprise
at the orange mushrooms
standing up from the brown
pine-needle ground.
White stalks, orange caps
speckled as if with grain.
The youngest seem just
this minute to have thrust
up bluntly from the soil.
The mature ones have opened
out into perches for fairies,
you can't help thinking,
twee though the image is.
Upstanding nibbleable
furniture, hinting
of poison potions
and folktales.
Timorously resolved
not to snaffle them -
a pity not to snap them,
but camera-happy wife
is not with me so early,
only the sniff-happy dog
I'm shortening the leash of,
while just one toppled
mushroom, gills upturned,
fingered, lifts gingerly
from among the pine needles
onto my palm for the walk home.
Here on the porch it can greet
the morningıs callers with its
orange warning of wildness.
Now the discoveries!
Amanita muscaria,
orange with pale spots,
fancied by Siberian shamans
for their hallucinations,
also a poison fatal for flies
and in large doses, humans.
Hence perhaps the current
shortage of Siberian shamans.
Through my Skull
Last night's rain
has flushed from the park turf
earthworms now straying
vulnerable
to any early bird
over the asphalt paths.
My hungry eye
scoops them up
into my skull
masticating them
into mere words
and an after-image
fading already in this
feeble short-term memory.
Ach, the birds can have them.
The two creeks in spate
meet and crowd their weight
over the weir under
the bridge into the still lake.
All these waters
my thirsty eye filters
through my skull
channelling them into
mere words. Distilled?
Ach, the ducks can have them.
Birds and waters throng
already long-term memory.
Under the cone-burdened
old Monterey pines
more bright mushrooms push
up through the sodden
brown mat of fallen
pine-needles over
stumble-inducing
tree-root knuckles.
Bend for a greedy close-up:
brilliant! My fastidious
eye cautiously sorts
perfect orange rounds
on chaste white stalks
from the older ones
slug-nibbled
leaning back to earth.
No-one's harvesting these,
their brightness a warning.
Trudge on, feasting the eye,
body leaning into
whatıs underfoot.
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