Some days the soil spits up toys
and teeth of broken glass.
Clay-scent and green insinuation.
Beneath, within, hyphae fizz
with information: phosphorus
for the river birch answered
by food converted from light.
Maybe what seemed haunted
is involuted. Here in the little
yard where I did not mean
to confine my life, quietness
gives acoustic space not just
to leashed dogs speaking their hearts,
not just to wrens and the outraged
catbird with her score of scolding
tones, but to a rumble I can almost
feel and chemical signals I may
respond to before I mean to,
the way a word of wonder leaps
from my tongue without leave.
Mycorrhizal conversations.
Brightly intimate seams spiking
through me the way a fungal
fruiting body erupts from an ant’s
head. Mycelium knows some things
about what the dogwood strain for,
undercover, and what I dream,
world I can’t call mine branching
and blooming in the sense of choosing
among histories and futures always
present, all at once, commensally.
—
Lesley Wheeler, Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, is the author of six poetry collections, including Mycocosmic (Tupelo Press, March 2025) and The State She’s In. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds and the novel Unbecoming. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, Pleiades, Poetry, Ecotone, and Massachusetts Review.
