Lichen and stone

i am born of river stone

smoothed by deep time

the twists and turns and curves

the topography of my body

shaped by eons

of glacial carving

and mountainous snow melt

frigid, flowing water

wild, howling over my bones

this shape is not my own.

i am born of friction

of erosion

of sediment soaring

in the thalweg

to be deposited in between

the deltas of my vertebrae.

sometimes it feels

like the river, more than anything else

dreamed me alive.

born of lichen

symbiotic mergers

every idea of me,

a multiplicity

every breath - every cell

endosymbiotic fusion

amalgamations of permeable membranes

dancing through osmotic gradients.

what is blood

and what is ocean

but the sweet delicacy

that spills forth

from my vessel, warmed

by remembering its own

geothermal ancestry.

born of unbecoming

every sense of self

that’s anything close to the truth

is full of spores

is a composting pile of duff

is an unraveling

emeshed in the chaos

of microbial succession

of tectonic tension

and the rotting of wood.

deliquescing Coprinus

feels more like home

than a stained glass cathedral ever will.

my God, my body,

is the unfurling fiddlehead

the blankets of ascomycetes after fire,

the violent creation of abyssal hydrothermal vents

the lightning over the lake

the pine beetle decimating stands

the Armillaria fungus birthing a new expression of forest

the unruly riptide

the rotting carcass that feeds soil Arthropoda

and the clouds ~like sky gods~ refracting

painting the sky in rainbows.

so I let my self be born

over and over again

and die over and over again

~my humanness~

each time,

returning ever closer

to my origins

of stone and lichen