My Thesis Is Finished; My Students Are Amazing; All's Right With the World

The Excrement Poem
by Maxine Kumin (Selected Poems 1960-1990)

It is done by us all, as God disposes, from
the least cast of worm to what must have been
in the case of the brontosaur, say, spoor
of considerable heft, something awesome.

We eat, we evacuate, survivors that we are.
I think these things each morning with shovel
and rake, drawing the risen brown buns
toward me, fresh from the horse oven, as it were,

or culling the alfalfa-green ones, expelled
in a state of ooze, through the sawdust bed
to take a serviceable form, as putty does,
so as to lift out entire from the stall.

And wheeling to it, storming up the slope,
I think of the angle of repose the manure
pile assumes, how sparrows come to pick
the redelivered grain, how inky-cap

coprinus mushrooms spring up in a downpour.
I think of what drops from us and must then
be moved to make way for the next and the next.
However much we stain the world, spatter

it with our leavings, make stenches, defile
the great formal oceans with what leaks down,
trundling off today’s last barrowful,
I honor shit for saying: We go on.

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I love to teach this poem. The way the rhyme scheme breaks down from perfect (from and some) to slant (are and were), to just sound echoes, mirrors this idea of the compost heap. Kumin shows us here that we can find history and beauty in any subject, anywhere.

Today, the Boston Globe proves Kumin right.
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If I owe you e-mails, poems, etcetera, I'll be responding over the weekend. I'll be posting more frequently about poetry, I hope, about gardening, I promise, and about junking, my favorite hobby.

This week I remembered why I own one of these:



I wonder if anyone else knows it's National Cupcake Week. Maybe I should write a poem a day about cupcakes. I am trying to do the NAPOMO poetry exchange, but yesterday I had to cheat and send doggerel haiku.