Recently, on the Grail Country YouTube channel as well as my own Regeneration Podcast with Mike Sauter, I discussed—among many other things, including William Blake’s Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion and magic—my upcoming poetry collection, Mythologies of the Wild of God, due to appear from Angelico Press this Spring. Part of that collection consists of a number of poems exploring the psychic content of some of the stories, myths, and legends that have lived in me throughout my life, as, for instance, in the figures of Arthur, Launcelot, Dionysus, Orpheus, and the Fairy Queen. Others, though, are poems exploring the landscape of Waterloo Township, Michigan (where I live and farm) and discovering the stories that arise out of that landscape. It has been an interesting project, because these stories I discovered (I can’t honestly say I wrote them) seem, to me, to have disclosed worlds that must have been there all along—or maybe it is that, upon my disclosure of them, I have released them and their reality tracks both backwards and forwards. I know this sounds weird. But I think this is how it works.
Anyway, I thought I’d share one of those poems with you this week. The name of the poem is “The Beacán” (beacán being the Irish word for mushroom). I hope you enjoy it at least half as much as I enjoyed discovering it.
THE BEACÁN
The swallows returned at the end of April, like angels,
When the farm was coming to life again, hale and sovereign
In their flying, blessing the barns with muddy nests and children.
I stepped over the tumbled stones of an ancient wall
At the meadow’s edge, the pear tree singing with bees,
Swallows whistling and scudding above me, the new-penny
Sun peeking through the trees in the east, and traveled
A pathless way through the high grass to the woods beyond.
Pine gave way to oak and maple, oak and maple gave way to beech,
And I stood amid the silver musculature of the trees’ reaching,
The cool breath of the forest winding its way through deer paths
And over moss-covered remnants of trees, the lairs of salamanders
And newts that nestled under the greenness and within the rotting wood.
Dappling the forest floor, scattered everywhere, I saw
A wealth of mushrooms: some amber, some grey, some crimson,
Pocked or fluted, shiny or dull, pushing through dead leaves
And from the rotted corpse of a deer. One I found stood out:
The color of sea foam, milky and green, it dazzled my eye.
I plucked it from the leaf mould and its rich, earthy aroma filled the air,
Then noticed a trickle of blood from the stem. I placed it in the pocket
Of my ragged woolen coat and, after hesitating for a moment,
Without knowing why, began the journey home.
But as soon as I reached the beech
Wood’s edge I was held by a forbidding force that would not let me pass
Unsponsored from that realm. Neither would my words, like those in a dream,
Pass from my mouth, as if I were drowning in honey.
I heard a voice from the wind call my name and turned to see a lady mantled in green, her skin white as milk, her eyes sparking emeralds. In her night-colored hair she wore a thin circlet of silver braided with with ivy and beech leaves and her gown was as if woven from lichen and moss. “You have taken that which does not belong to you,” she said, and I reached into my pocket for the beacán to offer its return, though all I could feel was a lining damp with blood. “The penalty,” she said, “is to serve us full seven years, at which time, if you desire, you may return to your imagined world.”
Service. Servus. I know not the difference. I served the time as the time served me, though for the duration it was as if I watched an image of myself reflected in a pool of cloudy water. Even now those years, vaporous, insubstantial, only return to me in the snatches and rags of memory, the experience and life of another. Did I really learn the language of the hare? Did I drink the sap of the beech from cupped hands? Did I, in truth, learn the secrets of the raven and the owl? What I do recall is the leaving, when the lady kissed my eyes and touched my mouth with dew that tasted of deep Spring. I returned, yet never returned, belonging to no world of making, a lodger at the threshold of night.
Haunting and beautiful. Thank you for sharing this.
Beautiful poem, Michael. Thanks.