For the Lobaria, Usnea, Witches Hair, Map Lichen, Beard Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen

by Jane Hirshfield

Back then, what did I know?
The names of subway lines, busses.
How long it took to walk 20 blocks.

Uptown and downtown.
Not north, not south, not you.

When I saw you, later, seaweed reefed in the air,
you were grey-green, incomprehensible, old.
What you clung to, hung from: old.
Trees looking half-dead, stones.

Marriage of fungi and algae,
chemists of air,
changers of nitrogen-unusable into nitrogen-usable.

Like those nameless ones
who kept painting, shaping, engraving,
unseen, unread, unremembered.
Not caring if they were no good, if they were past it.

Rock wools, water fans, earth scale, mouse ears, dust,
ash-of-the-woods.
Transformers unvalued, uncounted.
Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in. 

I wrote about lichen and moss about a year ago, unaware of this poem then, otherwise it would have been added.

In some ways fortunate, because it gives me opportunity today to bring together those words with new pictures. I have, of course, no clue what the lichens are called that I saw this week, much less do I know if any of them appear in Hirshfield’s listing. But I love the sentiment of her words, the observation that a world can be made to live in, where life is possible, and that not all agents of transformation call for recognition – they just provide.

Music today celebrates a master of (thematic) transformation: Liszt.

Here is another take, by a master of (Liszt) interpretation, Lazar Berman.