Poem that inspired it all

Compost: An OdeWho 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 insistsit’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