Porkopolis

View of a Pig

• The pig lay on a barrow dead.
• It weighed, they said, as much as three men.
• Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.
• Its trotters stuck straight out.
• Such weight and thick pink bulk
• Set in death seemed not just dead.
• It was less than lifeless, further off.
• It was like a sack of wheat.
• I thumped it without feeling remorse.
• One feels guilty insulting the dead,
• Walking on graves. But this pig
• Did not seem able to accuse.
• It was too dead. Just so much
• A poundage of lard and pork.
• Its last dignity had entirely gone.
• It was not a figure of fun.
• Too dead now to pity.
• To remember its life, din, stronghold
• Of earthly pleasure as it had been,
• Seemed a false effort, and off the point.
• Too deadly factual. Its weight
• Oppressed me — how could it be moved?
• And the trouble of cutting it up!
• The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.
• Once I ran at a fair in the noise
• To catch a greased piglet
• That was faster and nimbler than a cat,
• Its squeal was the rending of metal.
• Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.
• Their bite is worse than a horse's —
• They chop a half-moon clean out.
• They eat cinders, dead cats.
• Distinctions and admirations such
• As this one was long finished with.
• I stared at it a long time.
• They were going to scald it,
• Scald it and scour it like a doorstep.

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[Pig]

• "A fox!" cried God's Son, and clapped his hands, gripping his fingers together. He seemed delighted. But seeing God shake his head, the Farmer's daughter called out: "Hear about our pigs!"
•  
• "Tell about the bees," said the Farmer. "Tell about sweet things. What's a pig but a pig?"
•  
• "A pig," said his daughter sharply, "is anything but a pig. And no pig is ever really happy either."
•  
• "Why is that?" asked God.
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• The Pig that ploughs the orchard with her nose
• Returns
• Strutting in her tiny tutu.
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• The Pig that lies unearthed out there, a giant potato,
• Or snores in the straw, an eyeless, legless
• Water-bed of wobble and quake,
• Can sprint faster than you can.
•  
• The sow fallen out there, cratered in mud,
• Like the circus fat lady
• Fallen off her tightrope, is not happy.
• She wants to be a real lady.
• The Pig that peers up at you, with blubbery nose
• And eyes red from weeping
• Wants to be you.
•  
• And the lean weaner, with his sawn-off shotgun grin,
• Squints his little Judas eye at you.
• Oh he's wicked! He burps laughter!
• A flea
• Earthquakes the world of pig.
• And he's splitting at the seams
• To keep in the explosion of laughter.
• His eyelids screw down tight, keeping it in.
• He wants to be a naughty comedian.
•  
• The big boar has problems
• With the battered swill-buckets of his ears.
• He keeps trying to arrange them over his eyes
• Like big poppy petals, but they're too floppy.
• I know I'm no beauty, he says. I live for my children.
•  
• And the piglets, in elevens and thirteens,
• Galloping like apples poured from a barrel,
• Flogging themselves with their ears,
• Trying to escape from their tails
• Cry: Take us with you, take us with you.
•  
• All pine for the day they will be people.

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Pig

• I am the Pig.
•  
• I saw in my sleep
• A dreadful egg.
•  
• What a thing to have seen!
• And what can it mean
•  
• That the Sun's red eye
• Which seems to fry
• In the dawn sky
• So frightens me?
•  
• Why should that be?
• The meaning is deep.
•  
• Upward at these
• Hard mysteries
•  
• A humble hog
• I gape agog.