"Fungus on Fallen Alder at Lookout Creek" by Ellen Bass

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend September 6, 2017   Fungus on Fallen Alder at Lookout Creek   Ellen Bass

Florid, fluted, flowery petal, flounce of a girl's dress, ruffled fan, striped in what seems to my simple eye an excess of extravagance, intricately ribboned like a secret code, a colorist's vision of DNA. At the outermost edge a scallop of ivory, then a tweedy russet, then mouse gray, a crescent of celadon velvet, a streak of sleek seal brown, a dark arc of copper, then butter, then celadon again, again butter, again copper and on into the center, striped thinner and thinner to the green, green moss-furry heart. How can this be necessary? Yet it grows and is making more of itself, dozens and dozens of tiny starts, stars no bigger than a baby's thumbnail, all of them sucking one young dead tree on a gravel bank that will be washed away in the next flooding winter. But isn't the air here cool and wet and almost unbearably sweet?            Copyright © 2017 Ellen Bass. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "Last spring, I had the privilege of being a writer-in-residence as part of the Long-Term Ecological Reflections Program of the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon. Time and space are overwhelming in this old-growth conifer forest where the trees are 300, 500 or even 700 years old, rising 250 feet into the sky, and where even the experiments are designed to take two hundred years. And then there are the almost infinite number of small life forms, living with, on, and inside these giants." —Ellen Bass   Ellen Bass is the author of Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). She teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University and lives in Santa Cruz, California.   Photo credit: Irene Young Poetry by Bass   Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) "The Combo" by Joan Larkin "Morning News" by Marilyn Hacker "OH NATURE" by Bruce Weigl Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

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