The Autumn Fungus

The autumn is full of spores.
They make me forget
bad food, asbestos air,
the unburied corpses
upon the battlefield.
Their mushroom heads
pop up like babies,
their fruiting bodies
fragrant and sensual.

Chilled now,
the brown-and-purple fuligo
no longer creeps
from its fixed place
at rotting tree-root,

but elegant umbrellas,
gray and brown and red-capped
form their own marching line
along the tracery of root-rot,
athwart the squirrel’s
doomed acorn burials.

Shelf fungus drills
into the anguished bark
of the street’s last-standing
copper beech patriarch.

My keen ears make out
the chitter-chit of termites,
the acid-song of carpenter ants,
running a food-race
with their fungal cousins;

my eyes are keen enough to see
that even mushrooms have their mold
inhabitants, a fringe
of Richard-Nixon five o’clock
shadow lining their edges,
black aspergillis, the rot
that dares not speak its name.

Mycophiles delight? The feast
of insects, faery furniture?
I am in no hurry to dine
on any of my chlorophyll-free
kindred. Too soon, I know
their business will be
the digestion of me.