COMPOST/
ONE AWFUL GARDENER
For Frankie (and all of us who love him)
What difference, then, twixt “universe”
and “least”?
No difference at all! For though the Sum
be utterly infinite, still those smallest
bits
will consist likewise of just as infinite
parts.
—Lucretius, The Nature of Things
Lorine
Niedecker’s work gives testimony to the weird kinship between imaginative process
and the constant transformational gravity of nature. It remembers that the
(material and spiritual) facts of a life are natural facts, locating them
accordingly. She looks to nature for company and instruction, with curiosity,
good humor, and humility as the similitude of natural process overtakes the
singularity of experience.
Ice
on
the minnow bucket
and
a school of leaves
moving
downstream (from Autumn, 1965-1967)
The directives of
her poem “Tradition” have been with me for many years and its attempt to
compass loss has been on my mind in the wake of our beloved dog Frankie’s
death. Part one of acknowledges a grand statement of poetic agency that we must
all come to terms with (“Thy will be done”). Part two challenges the simplicity
of this statement (and the relinquishment it represents) to suggest that the
onward movement of things is fundamentally collaborative, setting resolve to
work the soil, tending to life and its commotion like a garden, e.g. to meet
the maker at work.
I
The
chemist creates
the brazen
approximation:
Life
Thy will be done
Sun
II
Time
to garden
before I
die—
to
meet
my compost maker
the caretaker
of
the cemetery.
“Tradition” knows that poetic composition involves
layers of activity that include accretion and cessation as perspective and
capability manifest, giving way at intervals. It’s also a call to further
creation while we’re here with gratitude and good conduct, knowing that we’ll return
to the primordial heat of compost across the threshold of making.
Waking up to
write without Frankie for the first time this fall in almost fourteen years amplifies
his company and absence. He has been—and will be—a part of the most intimate
cosmology of our family and has been intimately involved in all of my
imaginative work. You can see the lines of his fur photo copied inside the
drafts of old poems and you can see traces of him everywhere throughout In the Marble of Your Animal Eyes
(Publication Studio, 2013), Every Living
One (horse less press, 2015), Indian
Summer Recycling (The Magnificent Field, 2019), essays and all other
writing that has happened on the side. I tend to write while I’m walking and we
were always walking together… Up around White Chapel in Salt Lake City (UT),
alongside the St. Claire River (MI), through the old arboretum in Tuscaloosa with
my wife, K, before we were married (AL), past pastures accompanied by roadside
chicken (NC), way up on the ridge with my son, G, tucked into my jacket in a
carrier when he was a baby while fog burned off the trees (NC), and again in
what has become our neighborhood in Cottonwood Heights these past few years (UT).
It’s hard to say
what the creative work we do means (to us or anyone), but it tracks the change
these walks made way for and provides company (somehow) that I desperately long
for in ways that are daily and ordinary. It’s easy to point to circumstances
that draw me away from it. The ones who remind me to precarious attention are few
and far between. Frankie has always been keeping time to hunker down, eat,
walk, and play. The routines we made together have always been a through-line,
reminding me to presence. And, even in the unbearable absence of his tags
rattling, I feel like our walks were preparing me to reflect and say goodbye…
P/
pR / rI/ iS/ sM/ mS/
s
While
light cuts into the layered stalks of weeds
A
catechism poor as purple thistle
Wide
distance from ash to black fur
Measured
in countless thin yellow flowers
—excerpt from “Tinder is a hatchet
job”
(Indian
Summer Recycling, 2019) *written July of 2009
……………….
This
fall, I can tell you the distance from three-and-a-half-year-old black fur to
ash is almost exactly ten years.
* * *
make
time
for
work
kindness
domestic
labor
attention(s)
death
others
make
time
to
feel
music
burn
or
float
on
water
………………………..
This
free-write (5.2019) forecasts where we were at the same moment with terrible
exactitude on the last day of July, a couple of months later: one to the
crematorium and another, heartbroken, drifting down a river with a five-year
old ginning ear-to-ear in his lap.
Shattering
clarity reminds me work is attention (and prophecy) that allows us to practice,
prepare to meet loss, and understand grief as a part of a wider range of
activity.
I feel
overwhelmed by irreparable loss and by the small cedar box that houses what’s
left of my friend’s beautiful body. A sudden and painful realization of the
other side of the old—Gregory Corso?—joke that “dying is for squares.” The
shape of Frankie's cedar box hovers like a broken row of pixels in my vision when I
look to the sunflower he liked to chew on, it makes an awful rhyme with the
carboard box he rode home in as a sickly, scared puppy with velvety eyes and
kennel cough. Do your paws still smell
like Fritos? Kirsten reminds me that Frankie would be a ninth grader now.
It’s impossible to understand the permanence of this change and the gratitude I
feel that he’s “home” with us again—I couldn’t sleep in the weeks we waited for
his ashes because I didn’t understand what to do/where he was. Frankie used to
sleep in our five-year-old Gus’ room and G has asked if we could pour some of
Frankie’s ashes into his bed to keep him company. Instead we made up a game
where we eat corndogs for dinner and steal them off from each other’s plates,
in honor of one of Frankie’s great heist of a corndog off from G’s plate last
fall. I eat the crust of the peanut butter sandwiches I pack for G’s lunch on
my own and go out into the yard to lay in Frankie’s favorite spots. I know
we’ll meet the same compost maker.
In Niedecker’s
“Tradition,” temporality is a call to good conduct. Niedecker acknowledges the
empowering buzz of presence, capability, and instincts put into the service of
a garden of elemental space and experience that’s much wider than the scope of
individual imagination. We garden for ourselves and, ultimately, for others to
come. The garden hails (and eventually rests) us—the work and the rest are both
our reward.
It’s
hap a bent corner post
Allows
a body into the cemetery
For
rest or winter grass
Where
family names are already
Worn
off the stones
It’s
wild turkey scratch around the roses
—excerpt from “Shine an apple”
(Indian Summer Recycling, 2019) *written
early spring 2011
Identifying the
“caretaker” of the cemetery as “compost maker,” Niedecker allies the rest of
death with activity—new life that will transform the cemetery back into a
garden space. Part of what facilitates this change is the nutrient our
attention(s), labor, and bodies bring to the soil.
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass celebrates the
ecological wholeness of experience in the language of gardening as the poem’s
music “bequeaths [itself] to the dirt,” entrusting the “corpse” of a fruitful
perspective to futurity as “good manure” where it is entrusted to the “you”—a
mantle we inherit as readers, estranged and dilated by the breath and energy of
Whitman’s lines. What do we do with this trust…? We commit ourselves to “pass
death with the dying and birth with the new washed babe,” e.g. we commit ourselves
anew to the wholeness of the experience. We go to garage sales, play
Transformers, work day jobs, and drift down a river laughing to honor the dead.
My teacher and friend, Donald Revell reminds me that we read poems “to see
where poetry has been”; we turn the compost to fortify the tomatoes and squash
and remember what is.
I talk to Frankie
coming in and out of the house… I walk around the neighborhood and drink the
milk he always used to finish out of my cereal bowl. I take a bite out of a
sunflower. The dead companion us all the time; they remember a oneness where
our shores dissolve into current.
This picture of
Frankie wandering through the middle of an early draft of Indian Summer Recycling in the summer 2012 reminds me that the
recording of poetry is fundamentally fluid and collaborative—a correspondence
that’s being advanced as it’s pieced together by the (living and dead)
community at large. It’s, thus, a place to keep and meet loved ones who have
gone ahead.
Here’s Niedecker
again:
I
walked
on
New Year’s Day
beside
the trees
my
father now gone planted
evenly
following
the
road
Each
spoke (from North Central)
Books are fields
of energy and I have always laid them out across the floor—to live with them
and think about the way poems speak to each other/make their own sense. Every Living One and Indian Summer Recycling laid around for
weeks over the years, at intervals, collecting dust and doghair. Frankie would
knock pages out and I would try to understand what it meant; he would curl up
to take a nap right in the middle of poems written when we were 2, 3, 4, 5
years younger. When the first copies of Indian
Summer Recycling arrive—almost exactly two months after Frankie has
died—I’m flooded with gratitude that we are alive and well together there and
terribly lonely when I set a copy on the little cedar box that houses his
ashes.
Memory is a
garden gone wild.
