Populus tremuloides/Leccinum insigne ^[2]

She’d wet the tendrils of a foundling thirst

and pattern-knit each phantom synapse dimmed

as, purling up the rot-swept sockets, she,

now eldest of a thousand sisters, split,

twinning out her virid tresses—past grief

grieving at the Pleistocene’s mouth. The Age

of Winter wasted toward an ocean,

a black vastness after landscape, a drum.

A comely aspen wood meanwhile began.

Selfsame sprung sister, sister, and sister.

At each insistent rise,

Down centuries of sisters, sweetly, she

struck fast and sang, the bubbling boletes come,

loosed of winter’s anchorage, a-bob, both

born of water, blessed of rot—shriveled soon

to soul-stuff, death-tethered specimens pruned

in a formaldehyde of borrowed words:

old codes swimming yet the cell’s soft cosmos

for all the rainfall’s sweet religion, gone.

She will go, too, the sisterhood in tow—

who rummaged for a touch of lasting life,

prized of her native continuity,

of the bone-quiet communion of things;

divined in the glass-eyed microscope, I,

who inked this offering—who tongued the skull

for sheltering thought, sciences for sake of faith.