Spores

The month one of my daughters stopped 
speaking to me I'd step out of the door after rain 
and see a proliferation of spores across the yard: 
jack-o-lanterns, burnt matches, false morels 
issuing from deep in the earth where a chain 
of changes is always fluctuating like tectonic 
plates. I didn't know how the slightest nudge
could tear a stalk from loam, a colony 
from a shingle of bark; and yet they always
came back. I didn't know how long 
I could hold a grief like that.