Twice Alive
mycobiont just beginning to en-
wrap photobiont, each to become
something else, its own life and a
contested mutuality, twice alive,
algal cells swaddled in clusters
you take a 3-lens jeweler’s loupe to inspect the holdfast
of the umbilicate lichen then the rock-tripe lichen
then the irenic 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 on
sporadic events
of dew and fog, a velvety
tomentum and the 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
though crustose lichen relish
decay, vagrant lichen go all
hygroscopic, spores spurting
out through walls split
at the invagination fronts
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
lichenivorous mites
triggers woodcutter’s eczema,
the bane of loggers knee-deep
in sweet fern sawing down cedar
in the presence of water, photobionts go turgid
in hours of dark respiration, a spermatic green-corn smell
takes the shape of a lamellated mushroom
in cavitating symplasts, spores loosen
into the elongation zone on a night of caterwauling loons
so evening finds us at this woods’ edge where
at a dead oak’s base
shoestring-rot 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
Forrest Gander is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer and translator born in the Mojave Desert and living in Northern California. Read more.
Forrest Gander’s poem “Twice Alive” was previously published in The Chicago Review.