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Poem: Lichen as Model and Metaphor

Science in meter and verse

Edited by Dava Sobel

Credit: Martin Ruegner Getty Images

Author's Note:


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What we all learned in high school about lichen—that it's the synergistic collaboration of a fungus and algae or cyanobacteria—is simplified in many ways. For one thing, the original organisms are changed utterly in the compact. They can't return to what they were. For another, according to Anne Pringle, one of the leading contemporary mycologists (with whom I had the lucky opportunity to collaborate), it may be that lichen do not, given sufficient nutrients, age. Anne says that our sense of the inevitability of death may be determined by our mammalian orientation. Perhaps some forms of life are immortal. The thought of two things that come together and alter each other collaboratively—two things becoming one thing that does not age—roused me toward considering lichen a kind of model and metaphor for the intricacies of intimacy.—F.G.

Forrest Gander is a writer and translator whose book Be With was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His work is often linked to ecopoetics and ecology. This poem is from Twice Alive, due out in early 2021 from New Directions.

More by Forrest Gander
Scientific American Magazine Vol 322 Issue 4This article was originally published with the title “Forest” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 322 No. 4 (), p. 24
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0420-24