Porkopolis

Traffic Jam

• I try to make eye contact with a pig.
• I see rumps and flanks, snouts
• through the flesh–hauler’s metal mesh,
• but no eyes and therefore no piggy soul
• greets me. We who were speeding
• now inch toward fate, fabled endpoint
• when spoils will be allotted and heads
• chopped off. We think of change as waiting
• ahead, a leash dragging us forward. Onward
• occidental soldiers. The next installment
• may well be mundane, tar slingers patching
• the long slink of highway, or deadly,
• iron jaws chewing at a Nova’s collapsed door
• as a man struggles to remember the one prayer
• he knows. Condensed, it goes something like
• Our Father, save my ass. The pigs
• will soon fulfill their bacon and pork rind
• destiny. Their stench is a hook through my nose.
• Probably the farmer doesn’t mind. He smells
• cash, knows his shoes and snow tires
• are gifts of swine. In some psychic stratum
• his identity and theirs have fused,
• fostering a love similar to a painter’s
• infatuation with her fat tubes of color.
• On the highway the jostling begins. From the air
• it’d look like a loom, cars strung out
• like multi–colored threads. And here he comes,
• the inevitable throttle–jock in a Vette
• or Trans Am who figures going eighty’s
• even easier when everyone else sits still.
• He’ll cut through us like a ginsu knife,
• like a neutrino on its way to forever being
• on its way. Arrival is the issue. When will we get
• where, and will what’s happening there
• play like the cinema of our dreams? I’m learning
• to accept these moments as lesson. Slow down.
• Take time to smell the pigs. Try to look one
• in the eye, feel the press of its stubborn being
• against mine. Let what’s behind me catch up.
• The woman bearing nature’s smile. The kid
• endlessly waving because he’s just learned
• an open palm cracks the shell of others’ lives.
• The man crying because the radio’s sent him
• a song from adolescence, a true love tune
• he thought he’d outgrown but sings with a teenager’s
• sob–packed fury. As traffic stops some get out
• to inspect stasis. With horn blasts come pig squeals.
• Somewhere John Cage taps a dead man’s foot, pleased
• by the music of happenstance. I close my eyes
• and accept the idle of the pig truck as the blather
• of a river. What we say to rivers they say back.
• This makes us feel less alone, not so afraid.
• I picture the person who’ll shoot or stun the pigs
• singing to them, even stroking them once, quickly
• though delicately, an assembly line of slaughter
• and devotion. It’s my way of imagining a hand
• filling mine with confidence at the end.