Analysis of Laura Kasischke's "Mushrooms"

Mushrooms

BY LAURA KASISCHKE

Like silent naked monks huddled

around an old tree stump, having

spun themselves in the night

out of thought and nothingness—

And God so pleased with their silence

He grants them teeth and tongues.

Like us.

How long have you been gone?

A child’s hot tears on my bare arms.

Source- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/241556

The first stanza talks about a bunch of mushrooms huddled around an old tree stump and compares their silent growth and sprouting(spun) at that night itself out of thought and nothingness to that of the monks, calm and peaceful; thus personifying the mushrooms.

But why does the poetess sees them as huddled rather than just growing or sprouting? People huddle around things that have some importance. This scene of mushrooms silently growing around a tree stump at night seems quite a sad picture. Imagine those poor small beings in cold and dark. May be they have gathered to mourn over the death of the tree, or waiting for it to grow back despite knowing it won’t.  May be this personification has some meaning in the bigger picture of the poem.

In the second stanza then, god is so pleased with their silence that he grants them teeth and tongue, which could be inferred as a symbolical reference to either power of speech or taste. So is it the mushrooms that get the ability of speech or taste? Perhaps that’s their gift for waiting silently so that they would be able to talk about it amongst themselves. Or maybe the picture of mushrooms gathered around a tree stump gets blessed to be powerful enough to signify something sad, to speak for itself, like a funeral when one doesn’t needs to explain his silence or tears. It might be the scene, here, that gets the metaphorical teeth and tongue.

“Like us” says the third stanza consisting only two words, spilling the beans, that the whole scene of mushrooms standing around a tree stump like monks and god blessing them with teeth and tongue was referring to what is mentioned in the last stanza where a child’s hot tears fall on the poetess’s hand.

The dialogue in the last stanza: “How long have you been gone?” clearly indicates, after the gloomy picture in the previous stanzas, that it’s a poem about mourning. The poetess and the child, probably siblings, seem to be grieving about the loss of someone, standing silently like the mushrooms mourning for the cut tree. There’s a story here. The child, most probably the poetess’s sibling, is sad about the death of someone they were close to, maybe their parents. And the child, out of the two, breaks in to tears recollecting their beloved dead. It’s the tears in this case that get blessed with the metaphorical teeth and tongue, strong enough to speak for themselves, asking the one they have been mourning for-“How long have you been gone?”, or as if saying, “It’s been so long since you have gone.”
Coming to the scene imagery, its night and they are standing close to each other, perhaps hugging or the poetess is carrying him on her arms and that’s how his tears fall on her arms.

Conclusion- The child had been mourning silently like the mushrooms huddled around an old tree stump and then comes a simile that seems like a disappointed sarcasm: god is so pleased with their silence that he granted him teeth and tongue but not what they had been mourning for. The tears of the child get blessed to be able to speak for themselves; to be able to explain, what he is sad about, without any literal words; like the sad picture of small mushrooms gathered around a tree stump in cold and dark and not requiring an explanation.