Fulton, Alice

Some Cool

1. Animals are the latest decorating craze.
2. This little piggie went to market.
3. This little piggie stayed home.
4. It’s a matter of taste.
5.  
6. I have this string of pig lights for the tree.
7. Each hog is rendered into darlingness,
8. rendered in the nerve-dense rose
9. of lips, tongue, palm, sole. Of the inside
10. of the eyes and nose.
11. They wear green bows.
12.  
13. Driving home these bitterly Michigan nights
14. I often pass the silver bins of pigs
15. en route to the packing house. Four tiers to a trailer.
16. A massive physical wish to live
17. blasts out the slits
18. as the intimate winter streams in.
19. A dumb mammal groan pours out and December pours in
20. freezing the vestments of their skin
21. to the metal sides, riddling me
22. with bleakness as I see it. As I see it,
23.  
24. it’s culturally incorrect to think
25. of this when stringing pig lights on the tree.
26. It’s chronic me.
27.  
28. Our neighbor, who once upon a life
29. hauled pigs to slaughter,
30. said they are confined in little iron cribs
31. from farrowing to finishing.
32. Said steel yourself
33. this might be unpoetical and spoke
34. about electric prods and hooks
35. pushed into every hole.
36. About: they cried so much he wore earplugs.
37.  
38. While trimming the tree, I stop to give thanks
39. for the gifts we’ve received,
40. beginning with Elvis’s Favorite Recipes.
41. I’d like to try the red-eye gravy –
42. bacon drippings simmered with black coffee…
43.  
44. “Some had heart attacks. Some suffocated
45. from others stacked on top.
46. They were pressed in so tight –
47. hey, what kind of poetry you write? Well.
48. They suffered rectal prolapse, you could say.”
49.  
50. Why not spend Christmas with Elvis?
51. Invite your friends
52. to bring their special memories if the King.
53. Put a country ham in the oven and some of his songs –
54. White Christmas to Blue –
55.  
56. About: somehow a pig got loose. A sow
57. fuzzed with white like a soybean’s husk.
58. It was August and she found some cool
59. under the truck. When he gave her a Fig Newton
60. her nose was delicacy itself,
61. ticklish as a lettuce pushed whole into his hand.
62.  
63. Are You Hungry Tonight?
64. I speak from the country of abundance
65. curdled brightly in the dark,
66. where my ethics are squishy as anyone’s, I bet.
67. I’d like to buy the enchanted eggnog fantasies.
68. Instead I’m rigging the tree with grim epiphanies
69. and thinking myself sad.
70.  
71. For a gut level of comfort,
72. close your eyes, smell the pork chops frying,
73. put on “Big Boss Man” and imagine
74. the King will be coming any minute.
75.  
76. “At the packing house, some bucked like ponies
77. when they saw the sun. Some fainted
78. and lay there grunting to breathe.
79. Drivers hooked the downers to the winch
80. and tried to pull them through a squeeze.
81. Their legs and shoulders tore right off.
82. You’d see them lying around.
83. After the showers, they turned a hysterical
84. raw rose. They shone. The place seemed lit
85. by two natural lights, coming from the sky and hogs.
86.  
87. Pigs are so emotional. They look at the man
88. who’ll stun them, the man
89. who’ll hang them upside down in chains.
90. They smell extinction and try to climb
91. the chute’s sides as it moves.
92. At the top, the captive bolt guy
93. puts electrodes on their heads
94. and sends a current through.
95. I’ve heard the shock could paralyze
96. but leave them conscious, hanging
97. by their hocks from the conveyor
98. until their throats are slit.
99. Pigs have an exquisite will to live.”
100.  
101. After eight months he quit
102. and got a job screwing tops on bottles
103. of Absorbine, Jr.
104. Now when people ask what kind of poetry I write
105. I say the poetry of cultural incorrectness –
106. out of step and – does that help?
107.  
108. I use my head
109. voice and my chest voice.
110. I forget voice
111. and think syntax, trying to add
112. so many tones to words that words
113. become a world all by themselves.
114. I forget syntax
115. and put some street in it. I write
116.  
117. for the born-again infidels
118. whose skepticism begins at the soles
119. of the feet and climbs the body,
120. nerve by nerve. Sometimes I quote
121. “At mealtime, come thou hither,
122. and eat of the bread,
123. and dip thy morsel in the vinegar.”
124. Sometimes I compose a moaning section,
125. if only for the pigs.
126. Like surgeons entering the thoracic cavity – right,
127. the heart’s hot den –
128. I’ve heard we could slip
129. our hands into the sun’s corona
130. and never feel a thing.