Laurel Kallen

Following Filaments

            Mycocosmic, a riveting collection of poetry by Lesley Wheeler, entices the reader to examine the vast underpinnings of family bonds and strife, of mothering, daughtering, grief, joy and renewal – all through a series of daring, breathtaking poems. In Mycocosmic, Wheeler, who has previously published five collections, draws upon parallels in the plant and animal worlds, most notably that of the miraculous fungi, popularized in Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, which, along with other sources, is cited early in the underpoem that threads like hyphae through the entire book (9-11).

            A process of excavation begins in the first poem, “We Could Be” (3), which draws a parallel between the activity through which mycelia, immediately after a fire, begin the daunting task of restoring the forest and the possibility that we humans can similarly correct problems caused by our destructive tendencies:

Below ground, we could grow

fat on loss, bust out in the wildest

shapes. Puffball. Flagellate.

Our mistakes gorgeous in dispersal

across polluted skies. Help me try. (3)

Thus, from the first poem, the reader is invited into the poet’s endeavor: to join the complex mycelial experience of healing.

            Both a lack and a presence of healing permeate the next poem, “Extended Release,” (4) which catapults the reader into the poet-daughter’s experience of her mother’s dying. Bitter details of the mother’s dementia – “Can I have a bed? she says, while lying in one” (5), soften into the sweetness of an exchange between mother and daughter about their respective favorite places:

What’s your favorite place? She asks. I smell

the ringing edge of the ocean. Hers is a garden.

But there can be a garden near a beach, I say,

full of tropical flowers, we can be neighbors.

She might smile under palm fronds there, lit

            by hibiscus, full-bellied and finally warm. (5)

Although the love shared between mother and daughter is fertile, the grief that the poet bears over her mother’s decline and death coexists with her resentment of the mother’s past failure to protect her from her father’s abuse. In “An Underworld,” the poet recalls hiding in terror from her father:

I stopped my breath for as long as I could

in the grit beneath my little brother’s bed,

afraid of my father. Even the dust would

betray me if it dared, and what then?

Pupils so flared a kid could hide in there.

My mother loved but wouldn’t save us

or didn’t believe there was a passage out. (14)

            Here, the idea of an underworld is multi-layered. In addition to the hell that the child experiences as she hides under her brother’s bed, her trauma replays and persists in the psyche. Significantly, in the underpoem that appears on the same page, the poet alludes to “an underground library lending out speculating hyphae.” (14) This idea of speculation is pertinent. Just as in the mycelial underworld, there are hyphae with myriad tendrils performing varied tasks, in the underworld of our psyches, family members can recall and process events differently from one another. In the poem “Map Projections,” which follows “An Underworld” (15-20), the poet grapples with her sister’s failure to recall that she, like Wheeler, was also a victim of their father’s abuse.

When my father died,

I said to my sister,

I’m sorry I let

him do that to you.

My sister said, No.

I wasn’t even on his radar.

He didn’t think I

was worth it.

He aimed for you. (15)

. . .

Of note here is the way the conversation is presented on the page. The poet’s memory takes precedence, being left-justified and appearing before the sister’s contradiction in its own far-indented stanza. Both are followed by an ellipsis, which leads eventually to the poet’s increasingly detailed exploration of an incident between her sister and father and the context in which it occurred. There are additional instances of ellipses, which suggest the fallibility of memory. Of course, these ellipses also suggest the persistence of memory, as in the closing lines of the poem,

My pulse still bangs at the dinner hour.

The word island makes me think of my mother,

a compass rose who wheeled off the edge of the map. (18)

            The island evoked here is the “kitchen peninsula,” behind which the mother “blockaded herself,” effectively refusing to protect her children from their abusive father and then, inevitably, abandoning them by dying.

            Like nature’s sometimes calm, sometimes frenetic, processes, Wheeler’s writing erupts at times in quick-moving columnar verses and at other times in quiet prayer-type poems that include space between the stanzas. An example of the former occurs in “Oxidation Story,” in which “the body” succumbs to a “surgeon, who torched / the nursery like a mob of angry villagers.” (13) The poem goes on to examine the physiological and emotional release of anger, often followed by remorse. Its eruption as a single left-justified ragged column parallels the experience evoked:

You bet they’re angry. Everybody’s angry.

Physiological indices of anger include

rose-tinted vision, muffled hearing, rapid

heartrate, and perceived distension of time.

. . .

The body can’t remember. The body likes anger,

the livid exhilaration, not so much

the landscape after. (13)

Similarly, in “Carpenter Ant with Zombie Fungus,” another left-justified ragged column arrangement, the poet offers this volcanic image:

Some days the soil spits up toys

and teeth of broken glass. (66)

            Contrast these tsunami-like poems with the silkiness of “Forecasts Can Be Invocations” (32), in which a prayer falls in light tercets onto the page, beseeching the snow to soften the harsh ground on which it lands.

Snow, vote down that grass.

Snow, hush the root-shifted

vehemence of sidewalk slabs. (32)

In this poem, Wheeler asks the snow to fall “in [her] bothered mind,” (32), which presages “Doubled, Briefly” (47), a poem primarily in four-line stanzas, that grapples with the poet’s doubts about the quality of her own mothering:

Finally, I consider whether

I have been a terrible mother.

. . .

I would wake early Saturdays,

worried for one or the other –

decibel of fever-cry, a swell

of friendless misery –

because I’d been too tired

all week to register trouble

or fix what was mendable.

Crow-feather; slant pine tree. (47)

This searingly honest appraisal ends in an exquisite, if painful, couplet:

Mirror of lapses; hot spell simmers.

This love is hardly bearable. (47)

        This review would be remiss if it didn’t mention the word-play that Wheeler brings to much of her work. In “Minus Time” (65), she re-visits snow as a series of puns:

. . . Snow is me. Snow chance.

Snow money in my pocket never meant

to be spent. Snowbody knows the trouble

I’ve seen. Gung-snow . . . (65)

        Mycocosmic is as rich, varied, and layered as its title and as the fungal life to which it frequently alludes, particularly in its underpoem. This underpoem is suggestive of soil and the myriad forms of life it breeds. As such, it provides a parallel to the human subconscious. Mycocosmic mycocosmically reveals and evokes new mycelia of thought with each poem and upon each re-reading.