A mushroom is a mush, is a room

Something fungal is happening in the slightly damp but nevertheless also somewhat sunny southwest metropolis and this thing is mushrooms. Out of nowhere, it seems, mushrooms have sprung up on tree lawns and grassy residential plots. Little ones, saucer-sized ones, ones with bumps and ones with ruffles, dark brown ones and creamy white ones. "What the heck?" you might ask yourself, and never get an answer. The urban mushrooms just come. Of course, Sylvia Plath seems to know something of the phenomenological life of mushrooms. In her mushy, roomful poem "Mushrooms," the little mushrooms murmur in the fungus-light:

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

And what does the Dickinsonian oracle think of mushrooms? In short:

Warm in her Hand these accents lie
While faithful and afar
The Grace so awkward for her sake
It's fond subjection wear -
(E. Dickinson, 1307)