Now they come,
rising from damp whorled cones of cedar, cypress,
from dank soil, needled earth, ant kingdom,
corbelled underworld of roots. Jack o' lantern,
chanterelles,
or here, thick boletes and velvet blue spread's waste,
or the terrifying amanita, spurned
and lethal.

Did they seem
so mild? They induced visions, death when swallowed.
Others smelled of apricot, with a look claimed
by flesh in the gray afterlight of autumn.
When you held
them, their veined weight, waxy and slick, was swollen,
puffed like scaly, impossible eggs, their slime
soft as mud.

Spores explode
from splash cups or devil's urns, and some migrate
differently, the molds, dough-white or crusted.
They drink until a bursting wall breeds the tubes
called hyphae
that flow with proteins, water, carbohydrates,
oils, and bear their motile, sensing astrolabe
for fungi,

the gametes,
which are sex cells that orient each hypha
toward its moon or sun, so they knit the threads
that fuse a mushroom's fruiting body. Some shed
abortive
veils like doctors' gauze and rise in taffeta,
dead drunk at the ball, their flesh as pale as blood
additive.