the eye’s delight.
Eyes see too much.
They see
blood-colored worms and bugs
so white they seem
to feed off
ghosts. Eyes do not see the heat
that simmers in the moist
heart of decay—
in its unmaking making fire—
just hot
enough to burn
itself. In summer, it
burns like a stove.
It can—almost—hurt you.
I hold my hand inside the heap and count
one, two, three,
four.
I cannot hold it there.
Give it to me, the heat insists. It’s mine.
I yank it back and wipe it
on my jeans,
as if
I’d really heard the words.
And eyes
cannot appreciate sweet vegetable rot,
how good it smells
as everything dissolves,
dispersing
back from the thing
into idea.
From our own table we are feeding it
what we don’t eat. Orange rind and apple core,
corn husks,
and odds and ends the children smear
across their plates
are fed into the slow
damp furnace
of decay. Leaves curl at edges,
buckle,
collapsing down into their centers,
as everything
turns loose its living shape
and blackens, gives up
what it once was
to become pure dirt. The table scraps
and leafage join,
indistinguishable,
the way that death insists
it’s all the same,
while life
must do a million things at once.
The compost heap is both—life, death—a slow
simmer,
a leisurely collapsing of
the thing
into its possibilities—
hollyhock and cucumber,
bean and marigold—
potato, zinnia, squash:
the opulence
of everything that rots.
-Andrew Hudgins
(in Poetry Magazine, October 1985)
(in Poetry Magazine, October 1985)
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