October is the peak month for fungi in our local beechwoods, and it seems to be a good year for them, though like everything else in the natural world their abundance and variety are not what they were, and I have seen nothing since to equal one October afternoon back in the early nineteen-eighties that inspired the following poem of mine, when every stump, trunk and fallen log seemed to be covered with fantastic excrescences.

My mycological interest has just been rekindled by reading two excellent books on the subject, ‘Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind’ by Richard Fortey and ‘Entangled Life’ by Merlin Sheldrake. The former is entertainingly anecdotal and concerned mainly with the visible fruiting bodies that we think of as the fungi, the latter more concerned with the role of fungi, and particularly their mycelia (the normally hidden underground parts), in the ecology as a whole. Both highly recommended.

October Fungi

They are back again, the people of the woods,
A travelling circus of freaks: they have pitched their camp
On meadows of moss between the boles of beeches.
There’s no concealment here: they loll on stumps
In sulphur tribes or swagger in the leaves
Scarlet as outlaws. Fear is in their names:
Destroying Angel, Deathcap, Sickener.
The darkness bred them, devilry’s their lore
And parody their style. There’s Dryad’s Saddle
Perched, a monstrous butterfly of leather;
This velvet sleek translucence is Jew’s Ear,
There’s blewit’s ghostly lilac, polypores
Rubber-tough or textured like meringue,
Smelling of peach and honey. So we meet
Towards another year’s end in the woods.
What shall I say to you, gay-sinister
Consorts of corruption? Welcome, life.
The slugs have gorged themselves on stinkhorn jelly
And here’s a puffball ready to explode,
A wrinkled cerebellum, parchment-yellow,
A rotted sack of flour that splits and spills.
The spores rise up, dream-delicate, like smoke.
They glint and dwindle down the shining air.

David Sutton