Burrowing in your allotted patch you
move through the dark, muscles contracting one by one
in every part, lengthening and shortening
the slick segmented tube of you, furrows in your wake.
Devising passages for water, air,
you plot the gaps that keep the structure from collapse.
Dead things you know. Plants and creatures both.
Your grooves shift matter, sifting as you go.
Eyeless, your appetite aerates.
Eating the world, you open it.
You ingest to differentiate.
Under the foot-stamped earth, you eat into a clot
of leaf mould, clay and mildew, and express what you can
part with, as self-possessed as when you started.
Your secretions bind the soil,
your shit enriches it. How things lie
now will be undone, will reoccur. You, a surface-level archivist
sensing all there is
can be gone through. The body borne
within its plot.
~ from Fourteen (Green Bottle Press, 2018)
