For the Actor Luke Perry, Who Chose to Be Buried in a Biodegradable Funeral Suit Infused with Mushroom Mycelia
       

Luke, I've been thinking of your green
burial lately, the taupe shapes your afterlife
must take as it grows in soft lobes
up sassafras, black walnut, and beech trees

in Vanleer, Tennessee. Your family
kept your gravesite's location private,
so some punk won't pilgrimage there, hoping
to pluck the clusters of shiitake or white button

you've become, the enoki or reishi.
Luke, you know the bodies of Italian saints
displayed in Snow White coffins of glass
for tourists to gawk at in Rome? I never saw

God in the magic of an incorruptible corpse
which of course has always been
a performance: the prune-textured flesh
of St. Paula Frassinetti regularly bathed

in carbolic acid for the last century.
Roman Catholics used to believe
holiness could keep a saint's body
from decomposing. But, Luke,

I like your attitude. It's less Can't take it
with you, more Please receive
this gift, this body of holy compost. Alms
for the wounded planet. Luke,

I should tell you two things.
The first is: A year or so before
your fatal stroke and during an earnest
craze I'll call "my mushroom phase"

I bought myself an Infinity
Burial Suit, courtesy of my university
research account—same 'shroom-infused
pajamalike model you later got

in biodegradable black cotton. Like other
expensive formal outfits I've worn
only once, it hangs
among cocktail dresses in my home

office's closet. The second
thing is: As a child I owned your effigy,
your image cast in plastic for Mattel's
1991 celebrity-Barbie that portrays

your character on Beverly Hills, 90210, the sexy
rebel Dylan McKay. Confession: I once
dressed and undressed you, Luke, and I saw
what I knew, even at ten, wasn't

every body part, just a tan band
between your hairless thighs smooth
and neutral as a roll of packing tape. By now,
Luke, I've seen more detailed rolls

of packing tape than that, and all your parts
are now part of the Big Mystery,
freer than St. Paula still stuck in her
carbolic myth. I've learned some mushrooms

enrich the topsoil through their role
as decomposers—they help break down
rotten logs and dead animals. The fungi
degrade carbon-based toxins, too,

including the petroleum products
and industrial chemicals we absorb
through our skin, carry in our bloodstreams
throughout our lives. One of my

favorite fairy tale illustrations
is a lithograph by Russian artist
Ivan Bilibin—his portrait of Baba Yaga,
the Slavic witch, who hovers

in her airborne spice mortar above
a crop of red-capped toadstools
in a mossed wood. The framed print
hangs near my kitchen's stainless

steel gas range, that mix of the old
world and the new. Now,
when I stand at the stovetop, stirring
a sauté, I glance at the enchanted

mushroom-swarmed forest, Luke,
and think of you. I don't only
recall your heartthrob Barbie doll, all
cragged and broody profile and miniature

red corduroy zip-jacket. I think
of your late-in-life incarnation
as ecological ambassador
to the underworld who has already,

and unlike the preserved Roman
saints behind glass, returned without
a shinbone or a wisdom tooth intact
but as risen flesh, shape-shifting, everlasting.

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Copyright © 2021 Anna Journey All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission