United States, (b. 1944)
Someone Is Walking the Pig
- Someone is walking the pig in our downstairs hallway, where the shops are.
- No, I forgot, the pig is staying home safe these days. She’s a big pig,
- black with a white stripe down her snout, bright pink nostrils
- and hooves, as pigs have. She was wearing a pink flowered harness.
- Pigs are very smart. This one made little snorts when petted.
- She was an ordinary surprise in the hallway, back when things were
- ordinary. Days went on with their catastrophes and sorrows
- and weddings and dances. A graph of those days would reach up
- to about a four or five, and below the line, about the same.
- This was before the graph began to look like Mt. Everest
- above, and the pit of hell below. A pig with a flowered harness
- would be swallowed alive by the recent excitements.
- There are about a billion pigs alive at any one time.
- They can learn their names and they have excellent memories.
- They like music, and they sympathize with each other
- when one is in distress. They are ordinary in that way like us.
- When our pig used to come here, everyone would stop
- to greet her as if there were some enchantment in being a pig.
- Of course It is not that long ago that there were deep
- dark forests, and pigs digging truffles, and three little pigs
- in their houses of straw and sticks and bricks. Now all this regret,
- as if we don’t know how to end a story properly any more,
- as if we’ve forgotten the moral and just awkwardly watch the pig
- to see if it will do something clever, but not too clever.
Brown, commenting on Someone is Walking a Pig from Plume:
There were the ordinary days. We call them that, now, since the multiple catastrophes, the apocalypse over the horizon. So the pig appeals to me, the simplicity of her. Might as well write about a pig in the hallway. I haven’t seen her for some time. I hope she’s okay. At the end of the movie Don’t Look Up, just before the meteor hits the earth and demolishes all life, the family is holding hands around the dinner table. “We had it all, didn’t we?” one of them says. Here we had the pig in the hallway, a sweet novelty. How beautiful life is, and how seemingly impossible to maintain between the boundaries of normal. The poem is just drifting through those thoughts.
About the Poet:
Fleda Brown, United States, (b. 1944), is a poet, educator and author (aka: Fleda Brown Jackson). Brown has her BA, MA and PhD from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She taught at the University of Delaware (1979-2007) and was Poet Laureate of Delaware from 2001-07.
Brown has read and lectured in secondary schools, retirement communities, libraries, bookstores, a prison for delinquent adolescents, Rotary Clubs, AAUWs, and many universities and colleges, from Oxford University, Cambridge, to small liberal arts colleges. She has slept in a bunkhouse and has read with cowboy poets in North Dakota.
She is the author of ten collections of poems, including Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (2021). She is also the author of the memoir, Mortality, with Friends (2021). Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry series and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers’ Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. [DES-05/22]
Additional information:
- Fleda Brown – https://www.fledabrown.com/