10/4/2011 - horse manure
Great honking piles of it, black and fly-ridden, at the Bunker Hills Stables, and the groundskeeper Jim opens the gates to the paddock and lets me in. Round, greenish brown and ripe-smelling, flakey, I scoop shovelsful into my plastic tote bins to haul home to my garden. Keeping all the car windows open, I drive home with my dark, delicious mess. Here's what I think of--the ripe, green mats of grass on the underside of lawnmowers, a little of the sweetness of shit, like that guy smelled in the outhouse scene in Ulysses by James Joyce...the end of a romance...and something else. As I'm driving home, it doesn't smell so awful, more like band-aids, and I'm wondering if that's just the perpetual dose of worming meds that horses have to take...smells like a cross between band-aid and cunt...innocent and forthright, like it can't help smelling like the inside of a horse's colon, and what all it's been through. Katharine's raspberries all tasted like a mild, fruity version of the horse's colon, now that I know the smell, cause she mostly uses horse manure. Sensible, it smells like (unlike the oratorical version of horseshit), and willing. Horseshit smells like a future garden like lettuces and parsnips and tomatoes yet to come, smells like the pieces of clay soil and humus that blend and melt with it. I love the compost, love the dark manure as much as if I had expelled it myself.