Compost, Compote, Katabasis

Where pigweed and dandelion meet the stonewall and the wood grows denser,

I empty out the compost bucket: eggshell, corn husk, my ninety-two-year-old

employer’s spit, whatever he can’t chew or quit. Fork in hand, I turn the black earth

blacker, greeting, at first with terror, then recognition, the worm that circles

before burying itself deeper in the heap. I repeat to the dog pawing at the pile,

Sit. Stay. Leave it. He won’t listen—furrows his brow into a tricolored question, as if

asking, all along, who was I referring to, the earth? Whether

I want my life or not—and today I don’t, or I no longer want to have to withstand

change—I don’t think I can simply go

fading into the infant purr of an idle chainsaw, or the arms of the world’s most psychoanalyzed farmer ...

If I’m not yet available to what the land has to say. If the bales of hay are wet from rain

and the wheelbarrow has a hole in it. When I first arrived, I needed to scoop out plastic

bits from the heap with a stick. This pile used to stink. Now I can’t smell it.