Paul Brooke: Tending a Fungal Garden

Paul Brooke is a professor and once-trained biologist and naturalist from Ames, Ia. An avid outdoorsman and nature photographer, Brooke seeks to learn the intricacies of many ecosystems in order to understand his own place in the world. His work has been published in The North American Review, The Antioch Review, and Flyway. His newest book, Meditations on Egrets, was released in August of this year. Paul was also one of MWC's 2010 Great River Writers' Retreat winners and held a reading at St. Ambrose University on October 22 with Ann Hudson.

This poem stems from Paul’s newest manuscript, Kept in the Sunlight: Poems of the Rain Forest. In this collection, he uses the rain forest as a metaphoric hot bed. The poem examines leaf-cutting ants and how their ways could help understand our own.

Tending a Fungal Garden

Leaf-cutting ants
are Herculean,
carrying trunks
of stems and table
tops of leaves
enormous distances
to their burrows.

Inside is all rot
and decay, a bed
of fungus, which
they tend like
vegetable gardeners,
nourishment for their
soft-bodied young.

If I could, I'd bury
all the bad
of my life
underground:
the taunts
about crooked teeth,
the relentless gossip
about drinking,
the rumors
about hots trysts.
Compost them,
turn them, water
them, until they form
a single fruiting body.