Earthbrain (After Fifteen Years)

"More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet." - Marge Piercy
I receive an email from someone after fifteen years:
who are my roots, the unseen connections, nodes and nodules
rilling and trilling,
rifling the soil, shaking
hands beneath my feet? Those old friends
who helped nourish the part we see.
And the ancestors,
bones and ashes
mashed by worms
in the moshpit of destiny
some named, most forgotten
yet linking generation to generation
through violin music, the
building of roads
(which is perhaps just another form
of manifest destiny/
co-lonization),
some poets an eternity ago,
on and on, back and back,
deeper and deeper into the
earth. this tracery
of tree roots anchors
me through treachery,
poisoning, child labor,
and possibly even slavery,
backwards and down,
all the way back to earlier times
when we remembered how to
live with earth, harvest roots
backwards and down,
drilling down, and connecting across
to the tree roots of others' lineages.

do we notice, like someone
plunking our ancestral piano,
know each other, kin
to kin, kenning our kinship
(a kind of radical ecology)?

i remember how i felt
when i learned there are
fungal nets that span miles, extending
the reach of tree roots in forests,
tree to tree, and on,
serving as a kind of epicommuni
cation system:

satisfied that something greater
than what i could understand
yet still could sense, with my
outer antennae
of fungal nets,
how we are all touching,
communing, roots
slithering out, snakes
of earth
in earth

we are spreading and spreading
the sacred dirtlinks sucking earth
as large below as above.
my earthbrain
clock opposite below,
reaching out
and holding, kenning, kinning
kindle-spinning the earthweave,
the rootmop, cleansing, connecting
Medusa-spread and writhing lively.
root tips wriggling,
first goddesses,
beam me down,
brain of earth.




11-11 scooter cascadia