Walking in the woods on a damp day, we notice them.
There they are, thriving like miniature lettuce, green
and gray and damp and decorative, on tree bark, on
stumps and rocks. Their pale frills and fancy contours
charm me. They’re not fungi, and you can’t call them
plants, but they like to pretend, sending into the air
their pale fibers, delicate as lace, their intricate
fancywork decorating the forests’ profound dusk.
Fascinated, we hunt for examples as diverse
as humanity, some fine as hair, some gray and pale,
or dotted with colored spores ready to fly, to catch
any minor air, the moist environs as habitation.
Come summer, and some of them creep across
bare rocks, surviving the season’s heat, investigating
their deep, granitic cracks, over time splitting
the giant boulders by the force of mere existence.
On the path down to the creek, lichens dance
the wooden handrail, balancing like young gymnasts,
or old ladies in ball gowns. Variants of symbiotic life,
ambient, fanciful, buoyant, spotted red, flaunting,
frilled, they flirt on damp cellar doors, or on anything
old and dying that wants to come alive, to cancel
its un-being. Decorating the air in gray and green and
un-apology, the life forms join to celebrate, their pale
beauty doing its best to thrive and reverse entropy.
–
Luci Shaw is a poet and essayist, and since 1986 she has been writer-in-residence at Regent College, Vancouver. Author of over thirty-seven books of poetry and creative non-fiction, her writing has appeared in numerous literary and religious journals, and in 2013 she received the 10th annual Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University. Her new collection, Angels Everywhere, was released in 2022 by Paraclete Press.