This poem was written on Taungurung and Wurundjeri lands never ceded.
and I'd like to acknowledge the
permission of Natalie Harkin and
Lorraine Padgham to use their
words within the poem.
Grounds.
Malcolm Howie, painter of fungi
bound his watercolors and
died aged 36.
From age 16 he was unable to
walk and towards the end of his
life only able to paint with
movements of his wrist.
I consider making a crude
analogy out of his demise.
Mushrooms spring up  with autumn
Rain, expand shed their spores,
and decay; all in a matter of weeks.
It crumbles; fungi do not
atrophy, they do not fail.
When a fungal flower
perishes, it has done
its work until remade.
To walk the field again through
his wrist, flashing up threads
of pigment. As in life, the
fibres of a stinkhorn on a large
cream ground for hands.
It's skin tingles. Lines of
unfinished business bust from
the archive tall on fire. Sparks
carry up the air buzzing clouds.
A walk in the Victorian bush in
autumn after rain. In roots
of the ribbon gum metaphor
moves like spores or crumbs
ambling uphill.
The color of its rough speech
bubbles/paradise, trouble.
The colour of infected nymphs.
You are reading this far enough
from its place of making.
I am putting it together in Narrm
where fragile metaphors, tremble
and reach in custom made boxes
Forever 21 degrees.
Meanwhile, fungi provides a hot
mess of myth, since by virtue of
the ecologically and
ontologically articulated modes,
fungi inhabit, to  write of them,
is to write in a different way
than of animals and plants.
Like the primeval fern, the
fungus is pure Aussie Gothic.
The terror of life on other
terms in the oldest ocean-evil
and beautiful, sluggish and
blind and dumb - a land of floating
brains becomes the threat of
undifferentiated invaders as
thinkless slime reaching for
nutrients, budding selves,
getting and spending held
together by dirt and foul
tempers as their host consumes
herself slowly at first, but
then much more quickly.
And how green is the valley of
boho back-blocks,  where fungi is
heir to pagan plots:
troll cat/  witch butter/Sunday
bile. Sex spot.
Sowing future remembers.
Open-tipped. The lengths that keep
you like frequency or magnetism:
a peripheral circle.
Over the bogons,
the Bundjil Way.
You float from highlands to bay.
Your home is potentially
anywhere, a moveable colony.
I watched fast-motion films
of furry morsels rising and
falling out of logs through
suspended marshes across the
fat creeks. Sudden hills that
are lost to lowlands, were
grasslands, watercolor,
draining from the eye.
Repeated dryly in Roman
capitals.
But under the Herbarium's glass
a  pruney smile. There is juice
and bright and  a crunch of old
very light spice.
Australian poetry sees fungi as
Nativist; exotic locals.
Kinsella defends fungi to the
plough, which makes nothing from
something; he praises  its night
growth and industry.
Dutton sets blithe mushrooms
and maggots against needy sheep.
Shaw Neilson invites wakeful
lovers to hear caps surfacing
through the autumn dew.
Overnight, our
neighborhoods, walls, and
windows produced the words
BIG JIZZ  in a silver must.
Smut. In the colony it
was called Punk.
Metaphor is a dynamic tool for
building knowledge and enabling
new insights and connections by
relating thoughts from one
sphere to another.
The poet’s psychotropes handling
the fungus like, like, like, carrot,
cock, coral, cunt, crab. Still the
hyphae hang and spend themselves
chucking up their kids.
In  Howie’s work a Victorian
fungus is strong and dense.
Grripping a bundle of sticks.
Perhaps he reappears in the
flickered lithe, rarky flange
of his pictures and their purple
litter. A folded furtive voucher
deep drawers closing.
If you can imagine a toadstool
in joints, an interminable
string of toadstools, budding and
sprouting in endless
convolutions why, that is
something like it.
In his late confinement, Howie
saw a  rain-darkened trunk.
The port its puffs of brown
Smoke.  Flattened and tinny from up
here, gasping.
Ice thrashes in the river,
we read the pale history on
its banks.
Back in the city searching for
Taungurung histories: Books say
native bread doesn't rise in
such a volatile climate.
Back in the herbarium, country
flakes off the smooth, shiny,
creaminess of the colonies.
Rust and thrush: mycology sounds
see-through to me; all the words
removed of their soil.
But it's not so, the soil clings.
If you can imagine
how everything else
resembles a fungus.
At the edge of your vision, what
we learn how to see.
The curtain of strands, itching
and glancing, all this
struggling to leave out of
Yourself, to the possibility of
the colony. You can only clear a
place for it. Or relocate.
