THE BOG BREATHES. It gives and sinks and presses back, spongy interstitial, dense with death and the life that rises from the rot. There at the edge, near where the forest begins with its shadows and hush, a plant grows, a small congregation of pale stalks, four inches tall, with dangling bell-shaped flowers, tiny chimes that ring the world’s song. These are Monotropa uniflora, ghost pipes, and they feed not on sunlight, but on the mycorrhizal fungi that grow below them. The fungi take their nutrients from the roots of trees, the ghost pipes take their nourishment from the fungi. The fungi do not need the ghost pipes, but the ghost pipes need the fungi, “a prime example of the subversion of mutualisms in nature,” according to a 2009 piece in Annals of Botany. I knew someone who repeated to the point of obsession that we are what we eat. Clam, cannellini bean, plum, Pizzeria Pretzel Combos, bologna, oat. Most plants turn light to food. I don’t know what light is. I know it when I see it. The ghost pipes at the edge of the bog are white. Not the white of egrets or hotel linens. They have the look of ligament, a fleshy translucence, and sometimes, the faintest flush of pink. They look like frost if frost arrived in the night in summer.

Robert Frost wrote a poem called “Pan with Us” in 1913. It begins, “Pan came out of the woods one day,— / His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray.” Frost’s poems are what you learn a poem is when you are a child. Rhymey grade school singsong lines. But there’s darkness and ambiguity too. Frost had sorrow to make sense of. His father died when he was eleven, his mother when he was twenty-six. Of his six children, one died three days after being born, one died of cholera, one died by suicide, one died after giving birth, one had to be put in a mental hospital. The word sorrow comes from the Old English sorg, a soggy-boggy word that meant “trouble, care, regret, grief, pain.” In Old Irish (serg), Old Church Slavonic (sraga), and Lithuanian (sergu), it meant “sickness.” It is unrelated to sore. It is unrelated to sorry. Pan gives us our word panic—Where am I? What am I? What’s that noise in the woods? Lusty Pan, man-shouldered and goat-hooved, stub-horned, hard-onned. We don’t know who his parents are. He stomped and danced and fucked and played, out of sight of chimney or sidewalk or door. His was a devil’s mirth. But, in Frost’s poem, “times were changed from what they were,” and in this new world, his pipes have lost their power. “Play? Play?—What should he play?”

The notes existed before us, have always existed. They were there in the silence before the start. We draw them from the universe, assemble them, the few notes our crude senses can distinguish from the measureless field of sound, and from them make music. Play? Play? A recent summer afternoon, I wasn’t playing with myself, someone else was touching me, and as I came close to coming, I pictured myself a giant beetle. This was new. A little off-putting. What am I? I tried to broom away the thought and it dispersed how dreams disperse if you talk too soon in the morning, but then it was back and I was beetle again. All right. So be it. Massive black shining beetle with all its bent legs. Moments only. Everything right strummed and taut, I thrashed, dissolved, and reassembled to the form I tend to know myself. I’m not a bug. The encounter continued. Mutualism was not subverted. We took each other into ourselves. We take each other into ourselves. We are what we take into ourselves: penis, peach, and light, the music from living notes, hear and gone. The notes were here before us, the way calcium and phosphorus were here before us. We are bones and notes, assembled and disassembled, and we take what we need and more than we need, and the ghosts sing, and the ghosts sing their sorrow, and the ghosts sing their alltime song. Don’t panic. They are not sorry. They are not sore. The noise in the dim wood is hoof on twig, old song, chase and play, hawk wing, leaves and needles fingered by the wind, one more sporey dispersal. The song, the alltime song, is just out of earshot until we join the chorus, we’ll all join the chorus, where we learn the notes, all of them, where we know new music.