Compost: An Ode by Andrew Hudgins
Compost: An Ode
Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?
Job 14:4
The beauty of the compost heap is not
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, the heap
burns like a stove. It can - almost - hurt you.
I’ve held my hand inside the fire and counted
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 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 - we feed them all 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 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 -
both bean and hollyhock, potato, zinnia, squash:
the opulence
of everything that rots.
Andrew Hudgins.