Three short statements, each calmly excusing a bigger and bigger act of eating: that is the whole trick of "Consumer economy." The poem is about appetite and the stories we tell to justify it. It moves from timber to fish to "the world," and each time a higher authority seems to approve. Its central idea is uneasy and a little funny: when consumption is dressed in the language of necessity, nature or holiness, it can swallow anything without anyone feeling guilty.
The title is the first joke. "Consumer economy" belongs to newspapers and policy reports, yet the poem that follows contains no money, no shops and no exchange, only one-way eating. "Economy" also has an older, theological sense, the "economy" of salvation, so the title may already be pulling the commercial and the sacred into the same room. That is a reading of the word rather than something the poem states, but the closing stanza makes it hard to ignore.
The poem is built from three unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capital letters except for "Christ" and "God." The lowercase, flat voice sounds like someone reporting facts, and the only grand words are the two divine names. "We eat" opens the first and last stanzas, framing the poem like a grace before and after a meal, while the middle stanza steps back into the animal world. The tense shifts too. "The fish ate fish" is past tense and sounds like settled natural history, whereas "we eat" is present and ongoing. The poem lets the fish set a precedent and then quietly claims it for us.
The reasons given are the most inventive part. "We eat timber because / the night proposed it." The line break leaves "because" hanging, so we expect an explanation and get a non-explanation. Eating timber is already absurd, a job for termites, and the cause is odd too. "Proposed" is the language of motions and business deals, and also of marriage, so the night becomes a suitor or a salesman whose offer we simply accept. Judging by the imagery, timber stands for forests and building, the raw material of an economy, and the dark setting hints that this consuming happens half-unseen.
In the second stanza the deadpan humour peaks: "much to the satisfaction of Christ." The phrase sounds like a committee report, and "satisfaction" does double duty, as a customer's contentment and as a word with a long theological history. The fish matter too. Their image is closely tied to Christ in the Gospel tradition, so a fish eating fish is nature's food chain and also a darkly comic echo of a sacred symbol. The poem gives Christ the role of a pleased spectator, which nudges us to ask whether any such blessing is real or just convenient.
The final stanza raises the stakes and the ambiguity. "We eat the world / being very full now of God." "Full" works two ways. It is the everyday remark of someone pushing back from the table ("I'm very full now"), and it means being filled with the divine, as in a believer receiving communion. The poem seems to turn that sacrament inside out: instead of eating a sacred body, we eat the whole physical world while sure we are full of God. The participle "being" blurs cause and consequence. Do we eat the world because we feel full of God, or are we simply full of God while we do it? The poem doesn't say, and the vagueness is the point. Piety and greed become hard to tell apart.
Notice also how the poem's language shrinks as the appetite grows. The objects expand from one material (timber) to a whole species (fish) to everything ("the world"), but the sentences stay small and polite. That gap between enormous act and mild phrasing gives the poem its chill. There is no angry denunciation and no exclamation mark. The speaker says "we," so the reader is included in the meal rather than lecturing from outside it.
What makes the poem significant is its economy in the plain sense of the word. In about twenty words it joins ecological worry, religious imagery and a joke about justification, and it leaves the verdict to the reader. A longer poem might have preached. This one lets "very full now" sit there, satisfied and slightly sinister, and trusts us to feel the unease.