Decomposition

It’s the most natural thing in every ecosystem,
the body’s final contribution to the loop,
the breakdown of the protein and the prism
of the cells returning to the group.

We are rented, not purchased, said the carbon,
borrowed from the air and from the soil,
and when we’re done the debt is paid and pardon
comes in the form of joining the great coil.

The bacteria were here before the mammals,
they’ll be here when the mammals have returned,
and what we call death from our provincial angle
is just the balance being reaffirmed.

I find a kind of comfort in the science,
the elegant accounting of the earth,
the perfect environmental compliance
of every death becoming someone’s birth.

My atoms have been through a star already,
they’ve been through dinosaurs and through the sea,
and everything they’ve gathered holds them steady
just long enough to briefly become me.

And when I’m done they’ll redistribute widely
through the water table and the air and ground,
and everything that was assembled rightly
will dissemble and be scattered and be found
in something else that calls itself alive.

Decomposition is the earth’s own taking back,
the reclamation of what’s borrowed from the black
of soil and of water and of air that is on loan.
Every living thing returns what it has known.