A New Place, a New Garden

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Oak saplings at MWRD Dear Readers, Over the past few months, I have heard from a number of folks asking when I would start posting again. This has been heartening: an interested (small) reading public! Soon, I’d say and then do, not much. The truth is, since last I posted, almost two years ago, my life has changed a great deal in ways both dramatic and subtle. It’s taken awhile to adapt. In early 2023, my husband and I decided to leave our old, loved house with its 35-year-old native plant garden, and move into a hundred-year-old two-flat with our grown daughter and her dog. We felt happy to be upholding that fine old Chicago tradition of multi-generational two-flat living. However, like anyone else who has left long-term, settled life in one place, we discovered that the phrase “we moved,” doesn’t even begin to do justice to the upheaval involved. And then there’s the starting over/settling in process requiring new adjustments and forming new habits of life, for much longer than you m...
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April is Poetry Month 2014: Kumin's "The Brown Mountain"

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Maxine Kumin
This past year, we have lost fine poets that I grew up reading. Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Maxine Kumin all made nature their poetic home and the source of their word-hoards.  Each was from a different home ecosystem and thus utilized different language and imagery. Yet their subject matter carried in common the themes of beauty, death, love, and life with others that great lyric poetry entails. Walcott’s high-flown eloquence, Heaney’s stubborn earthiness, Kumin’s plain speech; all are worth reading and savoring.

Just recently I was out in the backyard stirring my still-frozen compost heap, muttering incantations--imprecations--under my breath as I endeavored to wake it up for spring.  Maxine Kumin lived on a horse farm, and her compost heap was of another order entirely. For Poetry Month this year I present her meditation on compost.

The Brown Mountain

What dies out of us and our creatures,
out of our fields and gardens,
comes slowly back to improve us:
the entire mat of nasturtiums
after frost has blackened them,
sunflower heads the birds have picked clean, the still
sticky stalks of milkweed
torn from the pasture, coffee grounds,
eggshells, moldy potatoes,
the tough little trees that once 
were crowded with brussels sprouts,
tomatoes cat-faced or bitten into
by inquisitive chipmunks,
gargantuan cucumbers gone soft
from repose. Not the corn stalks and shucks,
not windfall apples. These
are sanctified by the horses.
The lettuces are revised
as rabbit pellets, holy with nitrogen.
Whatever fodder is offered the sheep
comes back to us as raisins
of useful dung.

Compost is our future.
The turgid brown mountain
steams, releasing
the devil's own methane vapor,
cooking our castoffs so that from
our spatterings and embarrassments--
cat vomit, macerated mice,
rotten squash, burst berries,
a mare's placenta, failed melons,
dog hair, hoof parings--arises
a rapture of blackest humus.
Dirt to top-dress, dig in. Dirt fit
for the gardens of commoner and king.
 (From Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010)

Related Posts:
Walt Whitman, Deep Ecologist (Poetry Month 2013)
April is Poetry Month 2011
Gardener's Work
National Poetry Month in the Garden (2010)

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