Mushrooms on the Roadside

My friend is trying

to explain mushrooms

to me the way one describes

children, even though they close

my throat, swell the tissues

so my eyes are shut, fingers

unable to bend what for the

fluid released when mushrooms

attack. She is tall and Black and I am

small and Jewish and we are both

glorious and ruined in our own ways.

My friend’s leather satchel hits her hip

as she knives tiny wood ears into her palm,

as though each little fungus can hear what

her hand has to say but won’t tell us. And

as my friend points to another,

the tufted yellow of hen of the woods

with its skirt ripple gracing the tree bark,

I am careful not to ingest them the way she is careful

not to have a child. And my friend is talking

about decomposition which makes us laugh

because we are writers but also sad because of dead things

and also curious, nearly joyful because dead things

give way to others: dead apple tree on its side

is the home for morels and these large umbrella

yellows of hen of the woods announce themselves

on our walk and there, poking up from the end

of my driveway—right where a delivery person discarded

a package, a walker’s cigarette butt, someone’s forgotten

takeout, all of which will lead to their sooner end—

are small pink caps blanketing the late

September grass which itself is already passing,

and we are both struck with the pinkness, the soft

underside gills of these tiny ruinous things,

alive and dead both, the way of all past,

and we are surprised and delighted, horrified

all at once by everything ending and beginning

right in front of us when we had simply gone

for a walk to appreciate one of these autumn days

in which you seem to go on, open, and on.