When I think about dying, I think about worms,
how their bodies churn dirt from decay. Comforting,
perhaps, the resurrection of human use.
Kim’s roommate worm-composts, sells bins
of wriggling redemption, and in their basement
I kneel next to the litter box by the water
heater and watch worms slip through earth like
tongues, serpentine and fleshy, gobbling blind.
Give us your eggshells, your apple cores, gorge
us on regret. See how we till it all over,
munch invisible mouths. Track the tiny
gnathic movements digesting disaster. As a child,
I learned to bisect worms on the sidewalk, loose
new life with each swift scissor slice. Got more
than one brain in there, I was told. It’ll grow
what’s missing. Now I know the worm may
survive the split, but only the head half,
and anyway, these surgeries weren’t meant to be cruel,
ensorcelled as I was by the survivability of everything:
ants emerging from baseboards, flowers after frost,
a cluster of fungi in the ditch grass. Last summer
I went fishing on the river and when Kim
curled my hook through some bait, a weave
of pink spun to barb, I looked away
from the coiled wound, the softened snag
luring below grey water. Shores velour-slick,
my spot on the mudbank turned tenuous,
toboggan skid to rippling stone. A sucker,
a perch, a pickerel, Kim pulled them all up gasping,
dug metal from lips and stuck fingers to the gills.
When I caught a bullhead I held its urgent jerk
and lurch for seconds, screaming. The awful
interruption of my line. We threw all the fish
back, born-again, but even the moon is due
for disintegration, orbital decay gnawing the
space between us. Pull in, I think, come closer.
Tap the glass. Trace our squirming efforts
at reform. Watch how we bury what’s dead.
