The cosmos of Lesley Wheeler’s Mycocosmic scintillates in constellations connecting the earth’s mycelium to human stories, a mythos of our fraught place in the natural world and universe. This mycocosmos creates both a scientific and metaphorical space where biology, imagination, and language proliferate in overlapping fairy rings, shifting shapes in connection. Much as the stellar Zodiac and constellations depict dramas of the gods, these mycelia are offered as a medium for understanding human emotions. Central to the book are the patterns of love and loss as experienced by the speaker of the poems. Loss finds its correlative in the breakdown of matter by fungi—feeding themselves, plants, and other partners— releasing chemistry for transformation. Death here delivers a kind of resurrection. As for love, the opening poem portrays connectedness as inclusive possibility:
We Could Be
mycelial together,/
decomposing what’s still indigestible /
about this place…
we could grow fat on loss, bust out in the wildest /
shapes….
The brilliant structure of an underpoem inches forward in the footer, a separate poem spanning the book’s length, with segments of information, magical processes, and lyric voice. The opening line describes fungi emerging after a fire, a benefit of destruction. The life, illness, and death of the speaker’s mother unfold above, voicing grief and sorrow but also humor. In the afterlife, the mother is looking for ‘a place to go,’ both a ghost’s dilemma and a woman’s, looking for a bathroom. The relationship of the speaker to the mother is loving and complicated, a tangled network of conjoinment. The mother is introduced early in the book, dying. The reading experience of the poems is like walking through a forest, aware of a dusky earth fragrance, on a spongy map of deaths and miracles, contemplating earthly feelings. In “Extended Release” the compost of the sick mother’s garbage mirrors the medium for the growth of fungi. Life is irrational and spiritually curious:
…I could weep /
but I don’t. My mother keeps yelling into the landline, /
“Somebody’s at the door!’ I trash sour milk /
and a rotting pepper from the bottom drawer. /
She points at the ceiling whirlpools and asks, /
“What do you think I’ll wear up there?”
The forms of the individual poems are diverse like mushrooms. Couplets, tercets, sonnets, and prose poems seem to have grown overnight, sure-footed. The lines and stanzas are orderly and contained, balanced atop the unfurling of the underpoem’s ‘worm,’ a form daring to transform every page with its presence. Images bloom vividly in the gray spaces of grief. Imagery of survival, a dominant theme of the book, throbs with concreteness while illuminating larger ideas such as how things grow and why they survive. From “Aromatic,”
My mother and her mother /
grew among paving bricks /
in tenements…..
Mint survives almost anything, /
The speaker gives the grandmother’s recipe for mint sauce.
But green rootstalks sleep /
in my mouth, snarled, thinking.
The childhood of the speaker dovetails to the mother’s, grandmother’s, and mint’s survival. Hiding under the bed from her father, she dares not breathe, lying in grit. The mycelia always speak: They use a method to explore:
…learn by nosing around obstacles and surviving together. /
Death is the underside of the life-giving mushroom, and its shadow gives awareness to time, the present as tinted with the past and future. The title, “The Underside of Everything You’ve Loved,” conjures an image of Alice in Wonderland gazing up at the gills of a mushroom. The speaker gazes at the dimples beside a woman’s spine in her class:
People die for love…/
Maybe I would have walked across a forested border, /
if I’d never met him, into another country. //
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe I am only matter.
In “Oxidation Story” the speaker has her cards read, after opening lines about blood and surgeons. Time unfolds in the cycles of girl- and womanhood. ‘The body’ is the subject, recalling hot flashes and previous months of bleeding. The psychic tells her “good things come to you through fire.” She searches for a good thing, feeling sorry for herself as a girl. “Now the body is a ruin, haunted by a girl of twelve.” In “Peri-Aubade,” hot flashes keep the speaker awake, asking the question “who knew that each hot flash would arrive with a whistle of doom…” The answer, “Not you.” The wind is named as knowing,
blowing / bulletins about the mystery you are—/
you are and you will be— you hotly /
were and hotly now you are //
When undertakers arrive for the mother’s body in “First in Line for Takeoff,” the hospice nurse scissors off the mother’s shirt. The details of death amplify the grief. The ties of the undertakers, their Jersey accents. Leftover opiates and a previously ordered clean nightgown—we are grounded, in line with the speaker for her own place in the death queue. The speaker surreptitiously inhales the last scent of her mother in the shirt scraps headed for the garbage. The underpoem informs us that the mushroom is not as much of interest as the underlying mycelium.
Individuals are born and perish, the connective threads of lives and deaths do the important work of eternity, or at least some afterlife. Death is expressed as intimacy, skin flakes and other evidence of the body. “Mycelium breaks mess down to sense.” “No one’s gone, just enjambed.”
Another manifestation of death is extinction, and a poem about the dodo in a museum wonders why the speaker’s skin is singing, faced with this grimness. The dodo exhibit appears on a floor above the Venus of Willendorf where the statue exudes her timeless fertility. This ‘heartthrob’ is the reason for the elation. Death and life share the exhibition, death above, life below, life above, death below, reflecting the layers of mushrooms and mycelia, and the long gone years of the extinction of the dodo and creation of the statue. Close to death is, of course, birth. One of the most affecting poems in the collection is about the speaker’s imagining being carried to term by her mother, “In the Belly.” The word ‘carry’ means a woman carrying an insect crawling on her skin, then a parent carrying a tired child, and finally the pressure of the mother’s carrying and “(you) give her permission through your muscles.”
“The Red Door” is a poem of death, birth, and liminality, with directions for passing through. Among words about scars and healing, kindling and smoke appear, evoking the flames of possibility. After all, “volcanoes are fertile and aflame.”
“So your people left you alone in the wood: let go,”
“Let not knowing go. ”
“While exiting your body, // they may tear another hole. Don’t mourn it.”
“Return Path” describes a circuit looping through the speaker, who has presented herself as a non-believer. The image powerfully delivers us to belief.
“(I) believed I was separate, /
alone, done with gods, but here it is: /
I’ve found a way to pray. Through my feet, /
I reach down. There’s something animate, /
mycelial, that touches me back. It’s a species…”