Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Georgic: For My Friends Who Never Find Any

D AV I D A X E L R O D Georgic: For My Friends Who Never Find Any Like the universe, that’s how wild mushrooms grow from forest mold: everywhere is the center, find one erect pileus and spiral outward in concentric rings. In this way you’ll pick all you need to fill your bucket with black morels any morning in May, when heart-leaf arnica covers the forest floor in unbroken green that ripples like pond water, whenever wind tires of the pinetops and comes down to search among modest things closer to ground. I tell you this because you’ll have to kneel down a great deal, pray to the mountain’s god, who may answer, booming overhead or pelting you with sleet and hail. You’ll have to get on your knees, peer under the green shadow of arnica—canopy nearest earth, someone else’s heaven, green sky of a world always underfoot, trampled, ignored, very much like the other world you know better. 174 ❚ The 1990s But here, you visit only during a few weeks each spring, your giant face reappearing like a rare planet returned from its eccentric orbit. Which means you spiral, too, your life another ring in a pattern of rings with a random center of gravity. Or there is no gravity and you are one among many wanderers wobbling blind through space, until that metaphor evaporates like sleet and hail melting back into sun-lit air, and you’re just standing here at the edge of a dark grove of Douglas firs that didn’t fall to a chainsaw, and right here at the margin between what was destroyed and what was not, you clap your hands, laugh, and quickly kneel. The 1990s ❚ 175 ...