I am fond of red herrings, I like the taste, especially when eaten raw. They are most delectable when devious, when they lead you down the garden path and after a pugilistic encounter turn the other cheek. They are prone to bite the hand that feeds them. As a result of this I suffer frequently from tattered and bleeding fingers. I have to live on hand-me-downs, its a hand-over-mouth existence, a dog eat dog world, and words are the enemy.

On the other hand, though currently handless, and haunted by the specter of wordlessness, I find that words are weedy and wormy. They come and go of their own volition. Like thieves in the night they do their business, acting upon unsuspecting citizens, insinuating themselves into alien environments, bloggy minds made dull by an absence of metaphor. They worm their way in, twist and turn, bit by bit devouring the debris, burrowing through the garbage, through mindless thought and silly sentiments discarded, tossed, shredded, scattered on the trash heap.

These are the thoughts that sifted through my mind as I turned the weighty compost yesterday. Mature compost weighs as much as a dead body or a broken heart. This is how a rose loses its sting: the thorns rot, turn black, merge with scraps of pumpkin peel, cat hair, egg shells crushed to smithereens, weeds, fallen leaves, and all those plants that keel over and die despite the lavish love that’s come their way. It’s black and sweet smelling, humusy. The worms and microbes have done their business, chewing and regurgitating, turning the world upside down and inside out.

You scatter compost over your garden beds, and into planting holes. Two weeks ago I planted sweetpea seeds -- scattered around the garden in little piles of compost, in amongst the Goliath snow peas and Windsor fava beans, and under Autumn Damask, one of the oldest roses in the world, tough, thorny, festooned in clusters of double clear pink blossoms like scrunched up pink silk and with a scent that knocks your socks off. Today the sweetpeas are emerging as spindly green fronds, and as they grow so do weeds and volunteers. Dead flowers from last season, tossed on the heap, will seed in fertile ground. Cerulean blue delphiniums intertwine with orange marigolds, a tomato plant jostles with a gaggle of magenta cleomes, and everywhere borage and fennel and scarlet nasturtiums.

These are the thoughts that sifted through my mind as I turned the compost yesterday. It came to me that words are worms, and worms are words, and you can grow variegated red herrings galore if you have a richly composted unconscious. Between calculus and chance, you play a game, aiming always, like that wily old weeder Cicero, to persuade and move and delight.