moment.09 || in progress

Back in March we moved the compost from one corner of the yard to the other. In my journal I wrote about the experience, creating a litany of found objects: layers of silt and mud and cardboard scraps—the remains of a pomegranate shriveled to a witch’s heart, apple cores and orange peels, egg shells still white—half-domed. Sweet odors of decay.

Likewise, later in the same day I shifted a manuscript of poetry about, peeling back metaphors, digging for new ideas in the rearrangement of themes—the irony of the two separate events seems more than a little too conveniently timed—but it does call out the need for a poem despite their parallel arrangements.


A few weeks later this developed:

In a gray overcasting
of early spring


we move the compost heap
across the yard—


layers of silt and mud steam slightly
in my father’s red wheelbarrow


as clusters of earwigs scatter
with each new shovelful of decomposition,


each new layer of muck transposed,
relocated, and unearthed:


an empty husk of a pomegranate,
shriveled into a witch’s seeded (?) head/ bitter heart


rinds of oranges, past meals, leftover metaphors
and last year’s clippings of twigs and shredded poems,

scant remains of verses turned under—