Ecological Gardening: April is Poetry Month 2014: Kumin's "The Brown Mountain"

Monday, April 14, 2014

April is Poetry Month 2014: Kumin's "The Brown Mountain"

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.