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