Unite States, (b. 1935)
How to Fix a Pig
(as told by Dee Crimes)
- Take a piece of tin that’s
- Blowed off a barn in a storm.
- Pile little limbs and good chunks
- Of hickory on top. Get the fire going
- While you’re finishing the pit.
- Hickory burns orange, then blue.
- Dig deep enough to hide a flat-bottomed
- Creek boat. Put bars across the top
- Closer together then the ones in a jail.
- Flop the split pig skin side down
- So his eyes won’t watch you.
- Take a little hit from the bottle in your pocket.
- When you’ve got good coals,
- Spread ’em out under him with
- A flat-ended shovel. Pretty soon
- The steam starts. Douse on the vinegar
- And pepper. First time you sniff him,
- You start to get hungry. But you can’t rush a pig.
- Eat that cold chunk of corn bread
- You brought from the house in a greasy paper bag.
- When that vinegar and wood ashes smoke starts rising,
- And blowing in a blue wind over fields,
- It seems like even the broom straw
- Would get hungry. But you got to stand it
- At first. It comes from down home,
- When they cured tobacco with wood, and ears of corn
- Roasted in ashes in the flue.
- The pig was the last thing. The party
- At the looping shelter, when the crop was all in.
- The fall was in its smell,
- Like red leaves and money.
- So when you can’t stand it, turn up the rib side.
- If you didn’t get started before light,
- You may be finishing after dark.
- The last sparks look at you red from underneath,
- Like the pig’s eyes turned into coals, but forgiving.
- When the whole thing’s finally so brown
- And tender it near ’bout
- Falls to pieces when you move it,
- Slide it every bit into the pan.
- They’re waiting to chop it up at the house.
- And they going to wonder one more time
- Why a pig don’t have no ribs when it’s done.
Barbecue Service
- I have sought the elusive aroma
- Around outlying cornfields, turned corners
- Near the site of a Civil War surrender.
- The transformation may take place
- At a pit no wider than a grave,
- Behind a single family’s barn.
- These weathered ministers
- Preside with the simplest of elements:
- Vinegar and pepper, split pig and fire.
- Underneath a glistening mountain in air,
- Something is converted to a savor: the pig
- Flesh purified by far atmosphere.
- Like the slick-sided sensation from last summer
- A fish pulled quick from a creek
- By a boy. Like breasts in a motel
- With whiskey and twilight
- Now a blue smoke in memory.
- This smolder draws the soul of our longing.
- I want to see all the old home folks,
- Ones who may not last another year.
- We will rock on porches like chapels
- And not say anything, their faces
- Impenetrable as different barks of trees.
- After the brother who drank has been buried,
- The graveplot stunned by sun
- In the woods,
- We men still living pass the bottle.
- We barbecue pigs.
- The tin- roofed sheds with embers
- Are smoking their blue sacrifice
- Across Carolina.
About the Poet:
James Applewhite, Unite States, (b. 1935), is a poet and educator. He is a graduate of Duke University with a BA, MA and PhD. At Duke he later headed the Duke Institute for the Arts and is Professor Emeritus in English and Creative Writing at Duke University.
Applewhite is the author of many poetry collections, most recently Time Beginnings (Louisiana State University Press, 2017). His other collections include Cosmos: A Poem, Selected Poems, Daytime and Starlight, and River Writing: An Eno Journal. His poetry has also been published in numerous volumes, anthologies, and magazines.
A 1976 Guggenheim Fellow, Applewhite also won the 1998 Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. He won the Jean Stein Award in Poetry, by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2008, he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. [DES-07/22]