Introduction to Mycology

Shiitake, velvet foot, hen of the woods, wood 
ear, cloud ear, slippery jack, brown wreaths

of Polish borowik dried and hanging 
in the stalls of a Krakow market—all these

were years away from the room where I lay 
once, studying the contours of your sex

as if it were some subterranean species 
I’d never encounter again. Because I hadn’t

yet tasted oyster—not even portobello— 
when I thought mushroom, I meant the common white

or button, the ones my mother bought for salads 
or served in butter beside my father’s steak.

First taste of love, or toxic look-alike, 
there was your stalk and cap, the earth and dark,

our hunger, wonder, and need. Even now, 
I can’t identify exactly what

we were, or why, some twenty years later,
learning you lay dying—were in fact

already dead, suspended by machines if not
 belief—I thought first of your living flesh,

the size and shape of you. My amanita 
phalloides, that room was to exist forever,

as a field guide or mossy path, even 
if as we foraged, we did not once look back.