Parasite
a meditation on Monotropa uniflora
Sylvophobia is the fear of the forest
a fear I have never understood
but I can understand fear, anyway.
the unknown, the dark, danger,
the idea that someone is watching me.
Maybe a ghost?
Ah yes.
Ghosts.
I have plenty of my own peeking around the trees
jumpscare style,
and I know it’s probably metaphorical anyway,
My mother always said
I was something of a smartass,
but the first ghost I thought of
I couldn’t stop seeing
behind my eyes.
I know a ghost who lives deep in the forest
She stains the waters purple
And holds magic powers.
She lives in the hollows
beneath the umbrella of beech and maple
a diminutive flower
a parasite
Parasite:
Noun
a word which here means
an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species.
What a definitive word, “parasite.”
A sneering word.
A cutting word.
Parasites are undeserving, lazy,
Reliant,
Useless.
A drain on resources they choose not to work for.
My ghost is botanical
Monotropa uniflora
Ghost Pipe.
“The Artist Formerly Known as Indian Pipe”
A ghost with a ghost of a name
We’re trying to do better
Trying to learn some respect.
Monotropa: Greek:
“One turn,”
For the singular curved flowerhead
Bowing towards the earth
Uniflora: Latin:
“One flower,”
For obvious reasons
And redundancy, or good measure
(whichever you like).
Normal flowers sun their faces
Making sugar
from its rays
The ghost pipe has found another god to worship
Down
Down
In the darkened guts of the living, crawling, breathing world.
Parasite
Instead of sun, it drinks of life
Sampling tree roots, clicking into a mycorrhizae it did not build
The way I used to use my neighbor’s wifi
I don’t know what my ghost would watch on Netflix
My mother always said
She doesn’t believe in being a parasite
In fact, I don’t think she believes in taking anything from anyone.
Not even if they offer it freely.
I wish I could be a little bit of a parasite.
But then again, I wouldn’t know how to relent
Would it be so bad
to rely on someone else?
Emily Dickinson loved my ghost
(to be fair,
I suppose Dickinson was a bit of one herself,
all gossamer and white
and never quite what she seemed,)
“To be a flower,” she writes, “is profound,”
perhaps simply because a flower fights to live
and life
is profound
or perhaps she was talking about her
my ghost
and the profundity of remaining a flower
plagued by mistaken identity
pale and paganistic
known not for beauty
and being
what a flower
is supposed to be
take,
take,
drink from tree and fungi
siphon chlorophyll
when you cannot make your own
perhaps they won’t mind
if you just take a little…
My feet carry me
through the bogs of Waterloo
through oak savannah
to the peat blankets
to the crisp carpet of leaves in the beech forest
I spy
wizened dancers on pointe
skeletal ballerinas barely gravitational
tunneled from the inside
rings of Russula mushrooms spill from
one side of the path
to the other
brittlegilled
I suppose mushrooms don’t really care
about mammalian paths
their roads are subways, after all.
Forests seem big
and small all at once
depending on how closely and how long you look, I suppose
these trees are old
a few hundred years, at least
spaced apart and stout
microscopic creatures swim between them
in the mats of moss and lichen
hidden below the leaves
and below that, the fungi busy at work
commencing with the commerce of the day
My mother always said
she wanted a house among the trees
with windows that didn’t need curtains
and she and my father built it
my brothers and I flipped the decaying logs of trees that once stood
looking for salamanders
for years after they were felled.
My feet nearly crush them
a bouquet of the pale little things
ghost pipes
maligned members of this ecology
hello, small ones
at first you would behold them
as one might fungi
their pallor deceptive
and you might not be wrong, exactly.
Mycoheterotroph.
noun:
a word which here means
a plant which is partly or entirely non-photosynthetic,
obtaining energy and nutrients from fungi.
So, a gentle parasite?
Fungi are parasites as well, by that logic,
extracting energy and nutrients from decaying matter
and sometimes from living trees.
Is it different because they offer something in return?
When does a parasite become a symbiote?
What does the ghost pipe offer to justify its presence?
I read somewhere that 40% of ants in a colony are mostly inactive.
Why aren’t they thrown out?
I guess maybe there is such a thing as a free lunch after all.
My mother always said
“you can have anything you want, but you have to build it yourself.”
I’m trying.
I apologize to the ghost pipes for almost crushing them.
They observe peacefully, plugged into the floor, not apologizing for taking sugar from the mushrooms, which offends me more than it should
I pluck one, crisp and fresh,
holding the single eye up to mine.
It looks more like a flower when you see it this way,
from the soil’s perspective.
Curiouser and curiouser.
It occurs to me that maybe the mycorrhizae don’t mind sharing.
Perhaps they just like having a friendly face to look up at.
I carry the ghost like a beacon.
She seems happy to come with me back to my home,
to bathe in alcohol and stain it amethyst
and become medicine
to soothe pain.
And perhaps, to the forest, I am the parasite
like all the skeptics say
stealing food from the animals and treading where I am not wanted
But every time I ask, it always seems happy to see me,
even if I don’t have much to offer
to account for my small presence.