Two Gifts of Mushrooms in Two Sacks
I didn’t trust the ones
smuggled for us
purportedly
from the forests of Europe,
weathered, desiccated flesh,
and in what soil exactly
had these grown
and who plucked them
—we didn’t know,
or those others delivered by another friend,
some species never tasted
we kept imagining,
or the fate of the taster
unknown,
and some with a rind like a cantaloupe
or enameled, and
others apparently polished
like a rock in a tumbler
but soft necked.
I registered many shades
and simulations
at the bottom of the sack,
imagined their preferences
for decay, their embarrassment
without orifices,
the littler ones like chicken feed,
and then that smoke colored
devil’s horn snapped off,
and that flabby ear of a
shrunken horse,
and that doorknob
into the storm cellar
where we used to hunch
during tornado warnings.
Each sack so darkly deep inside
it seemed that if
the mushrooms tumbled out
and I accidentally trampled them
I’d be cursed forever
and wear a mask of measles
and run riot in a ditch
and filibuster a hillside
and turn into one of their cousins,
a known killer—.
Each bleached passport unstamped.
What did we miss
that unplanned summer
when a week apart these gifts arrived,
the interior of each sack
like the stillness
inside a small painting,
a forest folded inward,
enough for us to ask
what other gifts are wasted on us?
LEE UPTON’s most recent book is The Day Every Day Is (Saturnalia, 2023). Read more.
“Two Gifts of Mushrooms in Two Sacks” first appeared in The Day Every Day Is (Saturnalia Books, 2023).