Kneeling by a Toadstool

I went outside on a gloomy day which can be ideal for photography because you don’t have to contend with glare or your own shadow.  Instead I noticed a different shadow, a mental one.

I was practicing for a trip to Brazil we’ll take at the end of next month.  I thought that I would take macro pictures of day-lilies, but I became enamored with tiny toadstools instead.  After a couple of weeks spotted with frequent rainstorms, these cap-like spore-bearing organs of fungi were blossoming in the moistened earth. I even saw a small toadstool under construction.

The circle of what would become the cap was being made with a thin spring coiled and stretched along a string-like fiber, and I, a former biochemist, was watching a protein helix and a protein pleated-sheet (like those that make up our fingernails) come together into a single organ.  It was like I was watching microscopic chemical reactions on a macroscopic level.

Building Toadstools
by Jeter Skeet

Bookstore Café

I’m sitting at a flat-topped toadstool,
my legs astride its pedestal,
inhaling cinnamon-spiced hallucinogens
from the spores that pass
between the mushroom and my pen.

I’m sitting at a square-topped toadstool
inspired to seed the forest in which I live
with words inscribed on paper leaves
that grow on terraced nourishment
surrounding this mushroom place.

I’m sitting at a table toadstool
inside a café inside a bookstore
inside alternate realities found
in books trying to create possibilities
out of the magic practiced here.

I’m sitting at a toadstool among many
watching phantom toads be toads
while I pretend to be a novelist even
while I know my pen is being guided
by inhabitants of this fairy forest.

                                        12/10/08

Toadstool in Florida
by Jeter Skeet