mycorrhizae tag archives

Legerdemain

March 17, 2008

I was dealt a singular hand, & learned
to do tricks with the light:
sun sugar, bittering
at an insect’s approach.
I donned a conjurer’s robe of air plants.
Below ground I have discovered
the prosthetic tooth of a glacier,
round & granitic, & I hold it
like hard candy in my mind,
that ultimate rope trick of rootlets
& mycorrhizal hyphae
that never quite touch.
__________

In response to the Read Write Poem prompt, “be a tree.” Other responses are here.

(UPDATE) Hyphae, also called mycelia, are the “roots” of fungi; mycorrhizal means they are symbiotic with plants. See here:

In the ectomycorrhizal symbiosis between fungi and trees, the fungus completely ensheaths the tree roots and takes over water and mineral nutrient supply, while the plant supplies photosynthate. Recent work has focussed on gene expression in the two partners, on the effects of global change and nitrogen deposition rate on the symbiosis, and on the role of mycorrhizal fungi in connecting individual plants to form a ‘wood-wide web’.

Posted in Greatest Hits, Poems & poem-like things, Trees | Also tagged Read Write Poem 17 Comments

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- Metaphors for the Moon
  Early marriage is a wetland, a marsh
  of co-mingling reeds, breeding birds.
- Cleaning My Attic
  Cast-iron Royal, weighty and not regal at all but seriously proletarian, ostensibly portable in your anonymous black case: my secret unmusical instrument, which I lugged to cafes before they were wireless or even wired...
- Clumps and Voids
  The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.
- botanizing
  On calm days, the soil swirls and rises in isolated twisters. On a windy day when the wheat is being harvested — a day like today — the soil lifts like a yellow curtain, obliterating the sky.
- The Twitching Line
  My uncle, gutting a fish:
  removing the fins from either side,
  tipping the knife below
  
  the little anus, pointing the tail-
  end away, slitting it to the gills,
  then plunging in a hand
  
  to scoop the organs out, soft
  and scarlet as a litter of kittens.
- The Ordinary and the Wild
  I had a dream the other night about a tall machine, like a crane or an android giraffe, lanky with angles of metal that reach up to the sky when they should somehow be digging. When I woke I felt taller for a moment, and also deeper, as if the soles of my feet had met up with some spilled honey or errant tar while I walked in my sleep.
- Busily Seeking... Continual Change
  So the mountain was steep? I threw a couple of windbreakers, yogurts and miscellaneous snacks (really, whatever I could lay my hands on at the last minute), wallet, phone, bottles of water--yes, just the things I thought to grab into a new REI bright yellow daypack--and off we went. That was it. Toss things in a bag and go.
- Chatoyance
  And on the other side, what I
  set in motion: the open field, the low hill,
  a crease scored in bent blades of grass
  where I forgot the wall stood,
  my footsteps blurring as the
  grass unbends.
- Velveteen Rabbi
  There are trade-offs: in the womb we knew perfect intimacy, but couldn't meet. Now we are separate, which is at once the source of loneliness (especially for him, I'm guessing) and the source of our ability to connect.
- Will Buckingham
  My small guide and I then did our double-act of worshipping at the shrine, at which point the monk then declared that, once again, I was not doing it right. There followed another twenty minute lesson in proper bowing -- different from the previous lesson, in fact -- and if I have retained anything it is that one’s feet must be aligned like the lines in the number 8 -- an auspicious number in China.
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"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.