Out of the Dark - poem

Commonweal, Oct 7, 1994 by Dixie Partridge

The heads of mushrooms

were small globes in grasses

where they'd come overnight.

What sudden promptings had brought them up whole?

My son uncovered startled movement

when he kicked over a section of log:

dark scamperings, tunneled paths slender

as veins, slots the shape of watermelon seeds

leading down between albino tendrils

growing without a trace of green.

My mouth blurted out Swedish--

Ga forsiktight--but I could not translate

the words, knew I'd used them well,

my aproned grandmother suddenly there among lilacs

on her porch behind me.

He squatted there amazed, signaled me close,

and an old recognition came back

of things that thrive under darkness,

stirrings that draw toward light

then channel deeply to dreams; or slip out

when we react on impulse.

Our wholeness depends too

on what we've forgotten, the mirror of dreams.

Some parts of the past reach and grow

until they are something else,

or shift like soils into lost silts.

The future parades from the past;

underground twists exert their ways,

our stories going on in the dark

even when no one is watching.