Smith, Dave

United States, (b. 1942)

Pulling a Pig’s Tail

The feel of it was hairy and coarse
like new rope in Johnson’s
hardware store but I never touched
it or any part of a pig
until that day my father took me
where the farm was, woods
a kind of green stillness, the hanging
leaves from so much rain
I guess—it felt as if I was upside
down underwater trying to swim
for my life. The farmer, Uncle Bern,
said I could have one
if I could catch it. A little one
looked easy, about my size,
wary because he must have been unsure
of many things and hungry
because the small lives always are so
I chased him until foul mud
was all over me, the big men crying.
My father said it was just
that funny like a kind of gray soul
testing to see I wanted
badly enough to catch myself, black
eyes not seeming to watch,
on the horizon sort of—the weird way
I talked to it and finally it
listened to something and I took
hold, pulled, held, grunting,
digging my sneakers into the shit. Why
wouldn’t he bite me? I almost
got that thing straight but then saw
what wasn’t right, the hurt.
Let go. I didn’t say I was thinking
about school that was over
that summer, the teacher that yanked
my hair, who said she’d see
my life was straightened out, Lord.
I couldn’t tell my father
a pig’s tail burns you like all things
of beauty. I loved my school
until that wet day when it let me go.

Smithfield Ham

Aged, bittersweet, in salt crusted, the pink meat
lined with the sun’s flare, fissured.
I see far back the flesh fall
as the honed knife goes
through the plat, the lost
voice saying “…it cuts easy as butter….”
Brown sugar and grease tries to hold itself
still beneath the sawed knee’s white.
Around the table the clatter of china
kept in the highboy echoes,
children squeal in a near room.
The hand sawing it grandfather’s, knuckled,
steadily starting each naked plat
heaped when it ends. Mine
waits shyly to receive
under the tall ceiling
all the aunts, uncles have gathered to hold.
My shirt white as the creased linen, I shine
before the wedge of cherry pie, coffee
black as the sugarless future.
My mother, proud in his glance,
whispers he has called for me and for ham.
Tonight I come back to eat in that house the sliced
muscle that fills me with an old thirst.
With each swallow, unslaked, I feel
his hand fall more upon mine,
that odd endless blessing
I cannot say the name of …
the dead recalled, the jobless
with low sobs, sickness, the Depression.
Chewing, I ask how he is. Close your mouth, she says.
This time, if he saw me, maybe he’d remember
himself, who thanklessly carved us
the cured meat. The Home holds
him in darkness like coffee
we poured those days. I gnaw
a roll left too long, dried hard.
When my knife drags across the plate,
my mother shakes her head, whining like a child.
Nothing’s sharp anymore, I can’t help it, she says.
Almost alone, I lift the scalded coffee.
My mouth, as if incontinent,
dribbles and surprises us.
Her face is streaked with summer
dusk where katydids drill and die out.
Wanting to tell her there’s always tomorrow,
I say “You’re sunburned. Beautiful as ever.”
Gardening puts the smell of dirt on her.
Like a blade, her hand touches mine.
“More?” Then, “You’ll never get
enough, you think, so sweet,
until the swelling starts,
the ache, the thirst that wants
to bust a person open late at night.”
I fill my cup again, drink, nod, and listen.

Corner Room, Hog-Scald in the Air

This is the room where she sickened, the clotted wads of paper.
The smell is that of no-smell or, more precisely, a smell
from the ancestral memory of hair dissolving.
The walls lean down with an absence like an envelope ripped.
The bedsheets lie wrinkled and twisted, but no
blanket, none needed even this near winter.
Someone has left a shoe canted at the dark woodwork, a boot
badly scuffed, its tongue out, no lace.
Only hours ago I stood at these curtains and could not think
what good they did on this poor earth where she slept
in her small frame, where now blade of light
comes in clean and is all
the world offers in its daily deliberations. If we speak of
love, light will answer, Do you remember me?
But beyond the light I look, now, parting the gray fabric
whose body and smell are simple things we may know
as we knew the soft last glaze of an eye,
as we know, in time, our own coarse flesh weight and the useless
discarded shape of a shoe, the world’s garbage.
We are what the wind moves, scraps of litter
shunted against a fence somewhere, trying
to understand. Or if not that, simply to hold on and know
we are living, now, and nothing else matters. Yet we look
out of our rooms to see the green barn, burned
by wind, the fence diving over familiar hills,
a landscape of lime white in a sun cremating each particular.
We are of these particulars but we do not look
closely enough to know more than what
we have casually touched
until the wind slices
and whatever we leaned on is memory,
is the road I can see from her window, broiling and black
where the last cars disappear at a mound of earth
under a pale, relaxed sky,
and is also the insatiable lust of the mind to stare down
into a yard where someone stirs a boiling pot
and hogs, snuffling for scraps, blindly
lunge body to body, great scrotums swinging,
their squeals of discovery and pleasure the same
scalded, in dissolution, cries we have made.

About the Poet:

David Jeddie Smith (b. 1942) is a U.S. poet, writer, critic, editor and educator. Smith received a BA from the University of Virginia, an MA from Southern Illinois University, and a PhD from Ohio University. Smith’s work is characterized by his Virginian identity and an abiding nostalgia for the South.

Smith has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems 1992–2004 and The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000. Smith’s prose includes the novel Onliness (1981), the story collection Southern Delights (1984), and the essay collection Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry (2006).

His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, The Lyndhurst Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has also received the Virginia Poetry Prize (1988), and a Pushcart Prize (1997).

Smith founded a poetry magazine, Back Door, in 1969 and served as a coeditor of The Southern Review, literary editor of the Rocky Mountain Review, an editor of New Virginia Review and the University of Utah Poets Series. Currently, Smith is the editor of the Southern Messenger Poetry Series at Louisiana State University and Elliott Coleman Professor of Poetry and Department Chair at Johns Hopkins University. [DES-03/12]

Additional information:

Biography at The Poetry Foundation
Faculty page at Johns Hopkins University

Pulling a Pig’s Tail

Smithfield Ham

Corner Room, Hog-Scald in the Air

About the Poet:

Additional information:

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