Red light, where you were when the strike struck-to
and split, singeing thusly the center, burning
right through to bone, even in all that rain, even through
all that heart. It was a fall of meaty shelves, bracket
fungi lunged off the basswoods whose bellies sagged
with the clear milk’s weight dripping stiff
in clusters. Hard to say what sounded then, how that
symphonic stir slung off the caps’ gilled undersides.
True, those fruiting bodies smelled the heartwood’s sweet,
knew to snuff out its wounds and woo just inside them,
ingesting all it kept hidden. To know just what you want
and to get it, like the whelk, who siphons to its gills
the smell of its prey, then with its own shell drills its kill
open to feed on the slick meat inside. Hacked clean,
the bald fields sprawled endless that autumn, keeping nothing
in their blunted stubble. During the night, they dragged her
body across the path a few paces from where we surveyed
she died. When we found her, her eyes were open, her belly
still swollen from what tried to hide inside it. What killed her
knew the scent of her center well, knew how to woo her
and did. You were still alive then, when the ground was burning,
and the only thing we could think of for months was
of all that meat inside.
Photo credit: Jeff Kramer via Creative Commons