Work in Progress: Rare Breed

This is a long, rambling, maudlin poem, but I'm hoping that if I type it out here, it will tighten up a bit, maybe find a little meter.
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Rare Breed

for my grandfather, one year later

Flipping through the Field Guide to Cattle,
I find, unexpectedly, my grandfather's cows,
a cow and a heifer mugging for the camera.
listed as "Hays Converter," page 72.
This surprises the hell out of me
because they're Canadian, bred out of Calgary,
a hybrid of Holstein crossed with Hereford
and American Brown Swiss with Hereford again.
They're dairy cows that we raised as beef,
though my grandfather bred them
with Angus and Longhorn.
Our family recounts legendary tales
of the mean-tempered white Longhorn bull
and how my grandfather played toreador
that day a hot air balloon landed in his field.

The Field Guide to Cattle
describes Hays Converter
as increasingly rare.
This brings tears to my eyes
because, of course, we sold them all
when my grandfather grew too old
- 90 years! - to lift bales of alfalfa
to feed them. Rare, too, are the bales,
the very last alfalfa harvest
mown down last weekend, baled up today,
and sold. The fields now will be
put out to pasture, a wide and lovely
low maintenance, utterly pointless
expanse of grasses. Rarer still,
the farm itself, just five acres left
of the original eighty-eight
in a pocket of anachronism
one mile from downtown Albuquerque,
perfect for subdivision.
But, then
what would happen to the heirloom apples -
banana, transparent manzanos del sol -
and the sugar pears, lincoln pears, cherries and quince?
None of which we have the time to harvest.
And I have no right to use the plural "we."
I live in Massachusetts, my sister in Iowa,
which leaves my widowed grandmother,
my parents in their sixties, my mother barely walking,
and my brother, just my brother, able and willing,
working full time machining parts for cars and planes,
then working the farm and still somehow trying
to have time for his art, a life for himself.
How long can that last? How long should it?

Which makes Abuelo the rarest of breeds:
hispanic gentleman urban farmer,
quite possibly extinct,
as of one year ago.

Work in Progress: False Chanterelle

False Chanterelle
July 15, 2009

There.
Just in the corner of my eye
as I drive past, a flash of orange.
Driving back, more slowly now,
I spy, nestled amidst the moss
on a steep embankment held
in the grasping roots of a spreading oak
a field of tiny, curl-lipped trumpets.
I return a few days later
on a weekend when no one is likely
to mind or to witness me.
I stop the car under the oak.
The bank is a mycological wonder:
two large, ominous black puffballs,
a cluster of yellow hats fit for gnomes,
a bolete I might have found at Whole Foods,
small white flutes stained sickly pink on top.
Most of all, dozens of pumpkin-colored 'shrooms
that I am sure are chanterelles.
I gather five of the largest, no more
than three inches tall, half that across,
and take them home, despite their lack
of signature apricot perfume.

At my desk, site after site,
many similar-not-identical photos,
gradually convince me that I am correct.
And so I take one hopeful nibble.
For one anticlimactic moment,
I taste nothing. No fruit, just flesh.
Then the mushroom bites me back.
Its strong, peppery flavor sizzles
on my tongue, and so I sprint
for the kitchen sink to rinse it all out.
I never swallowed.

Was my pick a Jack-o-Lantern,
poisonous? No, too small and fails
to glow in the dark at all.
A more thorough search reveals
the dainty false chanterelle,
distinguishable from the red chanterelle
only by a stem lacking gills.
Not truly poisonous, some think it edible
if you can stand the gastric upset.
Later, sheepish and chagrined,
I stop to wonder - does the chanterelle
imitate its less edible cousin?
Perhaps it is the panworthy variety
who's truly false.