The Poet on the mushroom is the corona tasted

Same thread, a living root: we call it keeping. Same thread, the root gone soft: we call it eating. Nothing in the thread changed its mind — only the clock we held it against.

Sweet says now. Salt says now. Bitter says run, now. The fifth mouth answers slower. It holds the weeks the paste spent in the dark and hands them back as one low syllable. You cannot taste a calendar. You taste what the calendar did.

While the crown burned green above, the floor kept its ledger underground — lending, digging, ferrying salt to strangers who would never touch. Then the tree lay down. The light went out at noon. And at the rim of the darkened trunk the ledger fruited: a halo you could set on the tongue.

The eclipse, chewed. The corona, salted with rain and returned.

No jar sours alone. No cave ages the wheel by itself. What the verdict could not enter into record, what no story could set in a row — it lies down on the tongue without a sentence and is, past argument, believed. This is the commons, addressing you directly: not a case to be made, a flavor to be met.

Savor: to be worn, a little, toward listening. Breathe long, taste long, and the frame forgets which of its names it chose. Under connection, under rot, one motion, saying nothing, extending, touching, trading itself away at every edge —

and the last frame’s cullet, when it breaks, still tastes of the hours it kept the wrong time over.