Poem after a bird walk

14 July 2006

The receding glacier breeds alder and cottonwood
leafy and optimistic around me, but I
look down to avoid tripping
over rocks or roots, and see mushrooms
in the mossy rot below, some like bing
cherries, ripe with poison.

Suddenly I am twelve, cold and bored,
trudging through wet leaves in terminal moraine
parkland, somewhere on Long Island.
My mother carries a knife and plastic bag.
She peers into the collapsed ribs of fallen trees,
innards transformed to loose brown mulch.
She identifies fungi in Russian, names raw-
eaten like primary colors. She is certain.
The toadstools are easy; even I know them
from alphabet books filled with pictures
of red-cheeked children in red neckerchiefs.
But she sees the good ones first,
spongy china saucers caps
brimming with a gloss of sweet tea,
thick white stalks fringed in fine dirt,
the shallow root clinging tenaciously.

What is alien to the birch forests of her childhood
halts her with a brown cap, clean white gills,
looking empty of vomitous poison. She argues with my father.
Cantharellaceae or Omphalotus olearius?
Poison Pax or Blewit?
A white mushroom, I tell you.
She touches the tip of her tongue
to prove it, testing for bitterness.

Avoiding little brown mushrooms
that I know will send me into hallucinogenic sweats
for half a day, I examine the ground, searching
for something recognizable from a sauté pan
heavy with butter and sweet onions, salty potato chunks.
Suspicion sprouts in clusters under the bushes,
a shadowy band of assassins, a KGB unit.
I do not know their coded language,
so I leave them alone, snug against
the forest floor brown and fertile at their feet.