Lee, John B.

Canada, (b. 1951)

Rondeau of a Swineherd

Pigs sniffling then snorting in dust of their chop
Rooting and sneezing like snuff takers in straw
They’d run, leap in circles, and then they would stop
To stare at whatever it was that they saw.
My father in workpants with twine for a draw
Banged the boards with his hands that made the chaff drop
Midst, froze for a moment before they would thaw,
Pigs sniffling then snorting in dust of their chop.
In dry corners sleeping so warmly they’d flop
And I’d bring them all humped, dragged down with a claw
Their bedding shook free where they’d wake and then hop
Or rooting and sneezing like snuff takers in straw.
And I’d give too-close ones a kick in the jaw
So they’d race the pen while their trotters clip clop
On cement churned up for a game in the flaw
They’d run,leap in circles, and then they would stop.
But Tom, the man hired to muck out their slop,
Hated mostly those pigs, which stuck in his craw.
He’d slap out his fork with a soft side-tined fop
If they dared stare at what it was that they saw.

Red Barns

Last century
there was blood in the paint
on the boards of these barns.
Ontario, I have seen
the bleeding of a slaughtered sky
in the western hemorrhage
at the death of day
in the morbid menses
of a moon-timed afternoon
and thought of beauty dying
where it rubs the world away
in that the last of light
while somewhere else along the waking curve
young hours
warm the latches
on a dreaming door
and though a distant window sulks with rain
and pond mist
drifts like something burning slow
among the singing fogs
the blackbird’s flashing wing
wags off the weed in flame
and dove flutes
mourn their flight
ah, moralizing angels, pass above these mortal barns
they bear the proof of lambs
gone silent on our knives
they have the memory of hog’s lament
the sorrowing away
of market sows
the knackered beast
who proves his barrow’s heart
is emptied as a well-squeezed rag
and all the sweeter crimson drums
have dripped dark zeroes full to the flux
that’s quivered to final stillness in the ox
as thirsty cedar waits
to the very mow-boards
of these family farms
we’ve ghosts enough
to last us into unborn dust
make ashy berms from all romance
the fertile strangers yet to meet
and couple and decline
and this an awful art
behold the pigment of each generation’s fate
red barns have much to expiate.

Following the Plough: Recovering the Rural — Poems and Stories on the Land, edited by John B. Lee. Windsor, ON: Black Moss Press (2000).

The Corpselessness of Memory

Pigs can’t sweat and
it was 5 days at the CNE show barn
upstairs
5 days with the thermometer reading 100 plus
then bursting
like an aneurism all red die
and throbbing apoplectic glass.
Piglets panting like lap dogs
sows lying importantly in clean straw
and shoats sluggishly checking their pens
then flopping
with their eyes open
desperate with torpor.
One ignorant swineherd
poured a pail of cold water
over a prize boar’s back to cool him
but his heart exploded in his chest
and he lay dying like Jim Morrison
in an ice-cube bath in Paris,
but not half so romantic …
This hog
lay finally with all the symptoms of death
heavy as a small planet
his body a noiseless crowd of soft still organs
till he stiffened
like a Victorian church warden
and the heat wave broke
in the empty barn
5 days later
in the corpselessness of memory.

Those Damned Confederation Poets

The pigs glide
in the slickened floor
roulette
the hopper
like bullets
thumbed one by one from a spun cold chamber.
I’ve seen them there
playing at the chase
with the flimsy to and fro
of Tom the hired man
busy with their stringy leavings
rushing so his boot tops
wibble-wobble their orange hoops
loose noosing his calves
till they wear a reddish welt
in the flesh
like a tea-kettle burn.
I’ve seen pigs slide
like ball players stealing a base
then bunch, then run again,
then jump, hover, then slide
like field beans in a swivelled sieve
gather into small gruntings
bump nose, or snout lift a belly
so it wiffles hock to ham
like a watery wine skin
or sneeze in the quick-limed floor
so their truffling nostrils vomit
dampish breathy decisions
in the new straw.
Then when they settle clean nested
their ears flip to shake away
the nursing flies
and they turn their intelligence to sleep.
Then Tom could sit in his chair
smoke and curse their hide
while his rolled trouser cuffs
stiffened like stretching cats
and every muscle
pumped its black-hearted ache
with his brain
policing the hurt of boot movement
in each blistered toe.
In his simple dream
he garottes pigs one by one
with binder twine
or plunges his four manure tines
till the pink skin
is pimpled with wounds.
So much for the romance of work.
So much for those damned Confederation poets
who would have made
farmers of us all.

About the Poet:

John Busteed Lee (b.1951), Canadian poet, fiction and non-fiction author and editor. He was appointed Poet Laureate of the City of Brantford in perpetuity in 2005 and was Poet Laureate of Norfolk County, 2010–2014.

Lee is a member of the Chancellor’s Circle of the President’s Club of McMaster University And a recipient of over seventy prestigious international awards for his writing. He is winner of the $10,000 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, the only two time recipient of the People’s Poetry Award, and 2006 winner of the inaugural Souwesto Writing Award (University of Windsor/Black Moss Press) .

Lee has well-over sixty books published to date and is the editor of seven anthologies. He lives in Port Dover, Ontario, Canada where he works as a full time author. [DES-06/14]

Additional information:

Official Website of Award Winning Canadian Poet & Writer John B. Lee
Canadian Poetry Online – John B. Lee
The Ontario Poetry Society – John B. Lee
John B. Lee reads “We Mousy” by Robbie Burns on Youtube (no pigs, just a fav of the Editor here).