Porkopolis

Ode To A Swine
Convenire cum omni ente

• Envoi
•  
• What pig could himself deny
• A gently seasoned porky pie?
• The glistening splay of roasted snout
• The parslied porcine forefoot:
• Removed from life, from fat, from flesh
• Impartial blade made mince, mince, mince,
• Spread out among the crusts to taste
• Baked to melt, and melting licked...
• The silenced throat, the twining tail
•  
• 1
• Pig, I can no longer recall
• Why I move in this silent circle
• Toward incurious tomorrow
• From feast to truffled feast
• Lurching bellyfuls of lunch:
• From cottled prune
• To cuddled egg
• To fishy creamed and poached,
• Moving toward the unknown skewer
• Roasting unknown roasts.
• Pig pie never tastes the same
• In winter rain, in summer sun;
• Winter passed me yesterday
• Yet winter is to come.
• Memory marches backward
• Space flows out the door
• The mirror face is winking back
• At the face before;
• How we try to hang in time
• Stop the rhythm and the rhyme
• But the circle rolls us on
• Until we roll no more.
•  
• 2
• Pig, I rutted in prideful youth once,
• Pink and squirming
• I frolicked in mud and straw
• And knew the joys of trough.
• Yet I'm tired of my chewing jaw,
• The dark damp tongue, the eager teeth:
• I eat to live and live to die,
• So worm eats man and man eats pie
• While all the piggies wonder why
• They supplement the feast:
• An ancient tale of pig and sprout,
• The porky pudding, the appled snout
• (The apple you so liked to taste
• Now flavors you with prunish grace);
• What dimpled immortality
• Your fruited flesh becomes in me.
•  
• 3
• The pig parade is passing by
• Throatless spectres, eyeless eyes;
• Gravied growls from swinish jowls
• Assault me from my pie...
• Shall I hide my pork in honey?
• Or disguise with salty soy?
• Still you'd catch me gnawing on the
• brawny bones of boar
• As the everguileless lines of pig
• Prance through the butcher's door.
•  
• 4
• Pig, we're both roly-poly
• Till sliced down by time's blind butcher:
• Dismembered utterances ripple distance
• As these present time-wound words
• Like glistening pig-fat melt away.
• You did not know if,
• Unaware of subtler aspects
• Of your posture, walk, and talk,
• I overlooked your inbred woes
• Your persistent gaze from tottering toes,
• The plodding mule ploughing rows
• The fleet formicae to and fro
• Vain, vain in your consistencies...
•  
• 5
• But pig, Aha!
• Should you become grey for my brain
• Grub for my tum,
• Or should you simply stop and die
• Cease to sense, discharge from life,
• Feed first the raven, then the worm
• Metamorph to fecund soil
• Explode in silver fern,
• Then I would recall
• Your smallish tusk
• Your sixteen nipples so evenly placed
• Your ripe sow-dappled scent of musk
• Your steaming haunch
• Your appled face?
• Or would my portly pig-fed soul
• Be sucked through space from sound and light
• Where pig and poet glide together,
• Soundless through the night?