Wolf Lichen

On mushrooms at Crater Lake, 
you crawled over volcanic boulders 
and found it profoundly strange
that humans put writing on T—shirts. 
It had been a hard summer. 
Your mother’s illness had taken a turn.

Wolf lichen metastasized in tufts 
on old growth conifers. Their color— 
an alien yellow—green between  
chartreuse and reflective safety vest— 
made you cry. You plucked a tuft, 
tucked it into your overalls, 
and returned to the city where  
you slept with it on your nightstand.

Years before, we had backpacked 
in the snow—capped Wallowas 
with two rented llamas 
who nobly carried our gear 
in scale—balanced panniers  
one mile for each year 
our child had been alive.  

I noticed, around year five, 
a fallen tuft of wolf lichen 
on white granite. I captured it
with a photo we later printed 
on a transparency and illuminated  
with a vintage x—ray light box
we’d found at a rummage sale.

Wolf lichen glowed by our sofa 
through whiskey and forgettable 
episodes of TV, months of virus 
and violence, its backlit tendrils 
branching like neural dendrites 
where insight and sadness take shape.

Now, end of summer, you lean down 
to hug your mother in her wheelchair  
then stow your lichen, a talisman 
to astonish, not signify, on the dash 
for the road trip back to the Midwest.

Driving a byway in Idaho 
in a forest where wolf lichen thrives,
just as we’re growing accustomed 
to this new motif in our lives, 
we discover its name is derived  
from a practice in which ranchers 
ground the toxic lichen into powder 
and rubbed it into reindeer carcasses
to poison encroaching wolves.