Matthews, William

United States, (1942-1997)

Sooey Generous

Saint Anthony, patron of sausage makers,
guide my pen and unkink my tongue. Of swine
I sing, and of those who tend and slaughter them,
of slops and wallows and fodder, of piglets
doddering on their stilty legs, and sows
splayed to offer burgeoned teat to sucklers,
and the four to five tons of manure
a pig (that ambling buffet) reinvests
in the soil each year; of truffle dowsers
and crunchers of chestnuts and acorns I sing.
In medieval Naples, each household
kept a pig on a twenty-four-foot tether,
rope enough that the hooved Hoover could
scour the domain, whereas in Rome
pigs foraged the streets haunted today by
rat-thin cats, tendons with fur. In Paris
in those years the langueyers, the “tonguers,”
or meat inspectors, lifted a pig’s tongue
to look for white ulcers, since the comely
pig in spoiled condition could poison
a family. Indeed the Buddha died
from eating spoiled pork, vegetarians
I know like to insist, raising the stakes
from wrong to fatal, gleefully. Perhaps
you’ve read the bumper sticker too: A Heart

Attack Is God’s Revenge for Eating His

Little Friends. Two major religions
prohibit eating pork. Both creeds were forged
in deserts, and the site-specific pig,
who detests dry mud, has never mixed well
with nomads or vice versa. Since a pig
eats everything, just as the cuisines that
sanctify the pig discard no fragment
of it, it makes sense to eat it whole hog
or shun it altogether, since to eat
or not to eat is sacral, if there’s a choice
in the matter. To fast is not to starve.
The thirteen ravenous, sea-queasy pigs
Hernando de Soto loosed near Tampa
in 1542 ate whatever
they liked. How glad they must have been to hoove
some soil after skidding in the slick hold
week after dark week: a pig without sun
on its sullied back grows skittish and glum.
Pigs and pioneers would build America.
Cincinnati was called Porkopolis
in the 1830s; the hogs arrived,
as the hunger for them had, by river,
from which a short forced march led to slaughter.
A new country travels on its belly,
and manufacture starts in the barnyard:
hide for leather and stomach for pepsin.
In France, a farm family calls its pig
“Monsieur.” According to a CIA
tally early in 1978,
the Chinese kept 280 million
of the world’s 400 million pigs;
perhaps all of them were called “The Chairman.”
Emmaeus, swineherd to Odysseus,
guarded 600 sows and their litters
(the males slept outside), and no doubt each sow
and piglet had its own name in that rich
matriarchal mire. And I like to think
that in that mild hospice future pork roasts
fattened toward oblivion with all
the love and dignity that husbandry
has given up to be an industry,
and that the meat of Emmaeus’s coddled
porkers tasted a little sweeter for
the graces of affection and a name.

Truffle Pigs

None of these men, who all run truffle pigs,
compares a truffle to itself. “Fossil
testicles,” says one. And another: “No.
Inky, tiny brains, smart only about
money.” They like to say, “You get yourself
a pig like this, you’ve got a live pension.”
The dowsing sows sweep their flat snouts across
the scat and leaf rot, scurf and duff, the slow
fires of decay. They know what to ignore;
these pigs are innocent of metaphor.
Tumor, fetus, truffle – all God’s creatures
jubilate to grow. Even the diffident truffle
gives off a faint sweat from the joyful work
of burgeoning, and by that spoor the pigs
have learned to know them and to root them out.

Photo of the Author with a Favorite Pig

Behind its snout like a huge button,
like an almost clean plate, the pig
looks candid compared to the author,
and why not? He has a way with words,
but the unspeakable pig, squat
and foursquare as a bathtub,
squints frankly. Nobody knows
the trouble it’s seen, this rained-out
pork roast, this ham escaped into
its corpulent jokes, its body of work.
The author is skinny and looks serious:
what will he say next? The copious pig
has every appearance of knowing,
from his pert, coiled tail to the wispy tips
of his edible ears, but the pig isn’t telling.

Unrelenting Flood

Black key. White key. No,
that’s wrong. It’s all tactile;
it’s not the information
of each struck key we love,
but how the mind and leavened
heart travel by information.
Think how blind and near-
blind pianists range along
their keyboards by clambering
over notes a sighted man
would notice to leave out,
by stringing it all on one
longing, the way bee-fingered Art
Tatum did, the way we like
joy to arrive: in such
unrelenting flood the only
way we can describe it
is by music or another
beautiful abstraction,
like the ray of sunlight
in a child’s drawing
running straight to a pig’s ear,
tethering us all to our star.

© the estate of William Matthews. found in The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Sascha Feinstein, Ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1991-1996). First appeared in American Poetry Review. (11:2) Mr-Ap 82, p.18.

About the Poet:

William Matthews (1942-1997), was a U.S. poet and essayist, born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. Matthews earned a BA from Yale University and an MA from the University of North Carolina.

Matthews held various academic positions at institutions including Wells College, Cornell University, the University of Colorado, and the University of Washington. At the time of his death he was a professor of English and director of the creative writing program at New York’s City College.

During his lifetime he published eleven books of poetry and two posthumous collections were also issued. Much of Matthews’s poetry explores the themes of life cycles, the passage of time, and the nature of human consciousness and human foibles. He also often focuses on his particular enthusiasms: jazz music, basketball, and his children. [DES-01/12]

Editor’s Note:

The poet Diann Blakely called William Matthews to my attention. Blakely was a student of Matthews, and he remained her mentor as her writing career began.

Additional information:

3 thoughts on “Matthews, William”

Patrisko

13th August, 2015 at 12:02 AM

Ooh, I’m so mad! I thought the name ‘Sooey Generous’ was my incredibly clever creation but I see there’s already a poem with that title above. I just went out and got sooeygenerous@somedomain.com, though, so who’s laughing now?
- Dan
  
  14th August, 2015 at 9:05 AM
  
  Yea, sorry, Patrisko… That phrase spelled that way has been bumping around since long before the internet. But that does not make you any less clever, for sure. Independent invention counts for a lot. I hope you enjoy your email address, though it will require some spelling out and explanation when you give it out verbally. I’ll toast your cleverness with a single malt this weekend. Thanks for visiting Porkopolis. Root on!
Pingback: A Brief History of Pork in Poetry |