Thallus

Abstract

98 LESLIE ADRIENNE MILLER Thallus  Among trees it’s possible to make a menace of anything loved too much. Simply go into green on green on green until the understory is black. There, you’ll find a cottage, wrapped with fern and fir and a willow that skulks by the sturdy door like a man who might, then doesn’t, want to come in. The willow’s lapels will shine sometimes in the dark and lend an air of trench coat, of snake and leer and peep. You haven’t lived in terrain so grim in years, but this is also mottle and metropolis fizzing with lichens that mimic mariners’ beards and knit strange sleeves for stones. Some might deem this sense that a lurker’s near a torment or rebuke, but the lichen’s 99 tassel and ruff are not quite about the sun. They seek the salt and mist; they raise their specters only in the ripest mind. The loved and lost are like that, thin as paper, but rife. Wraiths that won’t wipe off, these whorls that borrow a body from the air can conjure wholes who cannot step inside, but melt right through your door. That lank of polished bone across his chest will smell of certain olives, steel, and smoke and make you want, then need, to unwrap the cage with its trove of oils, two blue buds, its ripening bellow, and dangerous divot of rib. ...