Coils in a silo in cavernous open space downward sloping
lined with aluminum panels crosshatched with grids; a hum.
A droning range. Tuned to the key of E. And a glare of light.
Intensifying a holy living form in the nave of the silo.
No secret for the poet-priests. What is it? Wondrous. Wall
of light: like the enormous gills of a salamander. Like a reef.
Like a colossal bone-white fungus with a feathered flesh.
Like the central nervous system of some vast exposure the light
nurses from loam and shadow. Metamorphoses of gloom.
Phase-shifting flanging of sound. A woven texture reticulated.
It is forty arborescent feet tall with three polyporous
conch-like shelves. Stained with bioluminescent signatures.
Sutures of daylight. And a central spinal stalk vivid in the form.
There’s a cord with bulbous contours out from which the life
of the animal emerges.
                                                Seeing it. Consumed with knowledge of it
incoherent unconfirmed. Terrified. But I recognize this creature.
I am its expert. I walk on one of its tremoring shelves tilting
to move toward the column to touch it. What stirs?

Shadow’s fruits are forms to shape out from the quarreling earth
the mind’s devoured worth, soil’s mash of relation
flexing hyphal threads repulsing with awareness enmesh.