Cover photo by Sheila Myers

The Mushroom Papers “These are poems that speak from a powerful sense of how ancient and ever-new the earth is and how variously blessed we are to live on it. Anne Harding Woodworth's poems celebrate the taut thrill of being, even as they recognize its hard incongruities.” – Baron Wormser Read more reviews . . . Available Here

from the poem, The Mushroom Papers

from the poem, "The Mushroom Papers"

1
Speed measures a cell's journey
and when it comes to mushrooms
acceleration overwhelms
with sounds of birthing and dying,
and what it's like to live through the night.

Mushrooms race each other
to be over with and begin again, which
is the familiarity of the forest floor.

2
They talk, too,
expose themselves with abandon
like strangers on a bus.
They don't have a lot of time to think
or get acquainted with anyone
and that gets some of them into trouble,
especially the poisonous ones
whose self-centering bursts in chaos.
The innocuous ones, most of them,
absorb fast under pressure.
They understand
how quickly the end comes
and concern themselves with behavior,
philosophy, substance, and wit.
They are pleasantly
self-contained

* * *

5
Bright yellow chanterelles
don't let you forget
they are Motown
and keep chorus lines going
with airborne music that moves
in happy and erotic speed
across mulch and bark
through sinewy branches
and diminishes only in fickle hearts.
But their legs fold fast,
and they say goodbye,
making spore prints out of tears.
Their heads droop,
they hunch, and their necks ache.
They soak in salts and try to revive themselves
but it's useless at their age.

* * *

14
As the light of this moment recedes,
I hear wings. Stems, heads, spores
move around, reshuffle, fly, disperse, and sow,
nod and kill and die and sprout and speak
and die and sprout and speak again.

There is music in the forest.
It's the Chanterelles, singing to the end of our day,
which, if it had eyes,
would glisten all night,
and if it had ears
would listen to the syncopation
in anticipation of tomorrow.

Martha, Last Passenger Pigeon on Earth

Up there in Petoskey
a woman sits at the museum door,
sees me, says to put a dollar in the jar,
says the pigeon in the case is
just like Martha
says, Martha's in our nation's capital.

Up there in Petoskey
the nameless bird
is poised on a prop-branch
listening for something. Where
are a bird's ears anyway?
If a tree falls and no one's there-
trees, all crack-sawed amputees, knifed
and dragged out of Michigan woods.
Took all the passengers with 'em
the old woman says, every bird of 'em, she says,
except Martha, says, Martha died in a zoo
at 1 p.m. September 1914
aged 29, got stuffed and sent to DeeCee.

In '54, the woman was on her way to the Soo,
says the bus broke an axle in Petoskey,
her migration from Toledo cut short.
Today she opens and closes the museum,
chatters and chatters to people like me,
hears not a sound, says she forgets
her hearing aid at home on the nightstand,
does it day after day.

Lichen

For Fred

"Old man's beard" curls
green-aqua, untrimmed
kale-like as if its name
is Laughter.

It grows out of rutted bark
that holds faces of the forest
like memory in sweet compost,
the perfect entwine underfoot.

The soft trail is steep.
Downhill is harder, you say,
keeps the pain afloat
in your knees.

And you, senex, walk on
without complaint,
smile through the ancient whiskers of your line,
and you smell so good to me.

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