At the Commune’s Five-Seater Composting Toilet Shack, 1991

That day, because you’d dropped the coffee tin
along with the peat moss down the hatch,
you were cleaning the chamber, heaping that ripe mud
out for the garden, smelly work you were much
too fond of. Digging, schlepping,

you thought of times the place got rowdy,
five folks elbow to elbow, passing the toilet paper,
the weird dance of odors, postures –
toes flexed, clenched jaw – music
of crap blasting off and then landing;

and thought, too, of those who’d built
The Five Holer, who’d hung the salvaged sign
outside: NASA Tracking Station,
and left the wall across from the bench
unfinished – open air between studs –

so people could look over the jewelweed
and briars to the ridge whose shadows & shapes
might not have been models of the body’s
plumbing. You thought of the builders
and how what they’d made learned you

that everyone does, indeed, fart, really rips it;
the various plyometrics of the wipe & breathing,
how we crap as much with our lungs
as our buns. That it’s no big deal,
that all rivers meet eventually, that privacy,

being a state of mind more than circumstance,
is a practice, like that digging was, like
anything that makes this life a little nastier
and beautiful and intimate is -- gratitude,
friends, remembrance, shit: so much, so much.