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| Jan Voerman Jr. Russulas |
Of
Moulds and Mushrooms
Agrippina, well aware of Claudius' greed
For Caesar's mushrooms, knew also that it looked
Like death-cap or destroying angel, so a god
Made room on earth for Nero, whose joke,
'Food of the gods', allowed for deadly poison.
Some still, with unreasoning fear, disgust,
Kick or switch down the mushrooms by their path.
Leaving the amanita rudely shattered, gills
Like fallen feathers scattered, veil and volva
Broken, and all this symmetry destroyed.
The lack of chlorophyll suggests the parasite
Which guilty man so readily despises.
These are strange fruit of the thin mycellium,
That webs this world beneath the surface,
And which can persist in its invisibility
Breaking down discard of leaves and timber,
Which otherwise would overtop the wood
Extinguishing everything, so that the seed
May sprout to nourishment, and the cycle
Of death, decay and rebirth still go on.
And I, aesthetic and somewhat botanical,
Would note and praise the diversity
Of shapes, variety of colours of the fungi,
Ball, club, shelf, parasol, cup and horn,
And the suave velvet of different moulds.
I would recall the fungi in their settings:
Fly-agaric, scarlet with wrinkled creamy warts,
In birch woods of Dumbartonshire, but lemon-
Yellow in New England, toxic they said to flies,
But intoxicant for the Kamchatka tribesman.
Near Selkirk once I found a monstrous puff ball,
Far bigger than my younger brother's head,
A gleaming baldpate beckoning me across the field
To find and greet poor Yorick's vegetable skull,
Solitary underneath the well-clipped hazel hedge.
Where once the monks had had their abbey,
Beside my Essex farmhouse, clustered blewits
Were palely violet below the dark-fruited sloes,
And the old gnarled oaks within the woods
Were sometimes richly shelved with beefsteaks:
And I, in a strictly rationed world,
Welcomed and ate these, and others that I found,
Spongy crepe, chanterelle and honeycombed morel,
Grey oyster-mushroom and tall dignified parasol,
Which I again met later on a Chilmark lawn.
Brown-purple trumpets of the cornucopia
Stand clear against the brilliance of the moss
Under a clump of beech-trees at Gay Head,
While vast fairy-rings, some centuires of age,
Manacle the cropped grass of the South Downs.
The wooden ships of England knew dry-rot,
Pepys gathering toadstools bigger than his fists,
So that ten oaks were cut for each one used,
And the white-rimmed tawniness rioted again
Among the bombed buildings that I sometime knew.
Fungi have made their share of history:
St. Antony's fire, from ergot in the rye,
Swept savagely through medieval France,
Rotting potatoes drove the Irishman abroad,
And French grapes grown on North American stock.
A mouldering cantaloup from a Peoria supermarket
Supplanted the culture Fleming kept for years,
And others now sample soil, remove and scan
The moulds that, in their destructiveness,
Aid ailing man by driving out his enemies.
But I, walking in fields or through the woods,
Welcome the vermilion russula, the sulphur
Polyporus, or inky shaggy-cap upon a heap of dung,
Without questioning their usefulness to me.
The ecology of my appreciation seems to need
Clavaria's coral branches on a damp dark bank,
Odorous stink-horns prodding through the grass,
And petalled dry geasters studding a sandy road.
These many-fangled fruits make bright
My sundry places where no flowers bloom.
Ruthven Todd
“These are
strange fruit.” It's mushroom season again, and again I am amazed by the variety and oddness to be found right underfoot. In "sundry places where no flowers bloom." That line especially draws me. The natural world is speaking, do we hear it?
