WORM
 BY GAIL McCONNELL

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.