The last thing that I wrote, the last
thing I will ever write
about mushrooms
compared their flesh to my flesh
and their gills to the gilly-white wings of angels.
Is that not just a bit ridiculous?

Don't we all, though, come into life with dirt on our heads?
Don't we all shake at something? slats of light on the floor
cast from a high window, shivering warmth

Instead, this less-than-pristine chapel
but oh my broken and
disdained glass windows remind me of the day
last december I walked 6 miles in the rain
through farmland
and the barns' rusted iron roofs resembled
the corrugated wings of angels

The pines creak, the clouds furrow
it is not the same after all, and after all
you invite in me the cool, the dark, the damp, the foundering
disease, this frail body to grow

I stood in your garden
that day among mushrooms —
you were not at home
— wide brim of a black umbrella
and rain beginning to freeze 

Ice layered inky caps
toppled off, leaving
papery white stems beheaded,
quivering; arrows plunged
haphazard in the mulch

shudder of feather —
a sudden profile of wings
glass-blown, glass boned
like palisades in the dusk