United States, (contemporary)
My Hero
- It’s O.K. to keep hearing your worries, so long as you
- stop talking to them. Shun them like a double-crossed Quaker.
- Imagine how quiet it would be, like shutting off the droning ocean.
- That’s how our parasites must feel about our hearts.
- What a racket, all that pumping. Shut up shut up.
- Cicero said Chrysippus said that the life in a pig is a preservative,
- keeping it fresh until we want to eat it. What then is life in us?
- Chrysippus wrote more than seven hundred books, none survive.
- (We have his bio in the Diogenes Laertius “Lives,” and small
- comments like the one Cicero preserved, about the pig.)
- Imagine how much the man talked. Imagine how his daughters
- felt, sitting in cafés, virgins listening to young lawyers. Lawyer
- ready to move from mom to virgin ears, to part the aural curtain
- to the heart of the flesh, to grease up and force his listener to stay,
- pressure like a fork, squeezed down inner tubes to hidden narrow
- chambers. The daughters, who could not listen anymore, worked
- into first-date conversation, “Of course I’ve had it in the ear before.”
- There were no second dates. Fierce Chrysippus sisters, full of hate.
- There were no surrenders. That’s why I’m so tender about my
- resignation. Because all these years later a nation of one feels
- like one too many. Caesar was tough, but not by himself
- did he conquer Gaul. The superlative for all alone is all.
Chicken Pig
- It’s like being lost
- in the forest, hungry, with a
- plump live chicken in your cradling
- arms: you want to savage the bird,
- but you also want the eggs.
- You go weak on your legs.
- What’s worse, what you need
- most is the companionship,
- but you’re too hungry to know that.
- That is something you only know after
- you’ve been lost a lot and always,
- eventually, alit upon
- your bird; consumed her
- before you’d realized what
- a friend she’d been, letting you
- sleep-in late on the forest floor
- though she herself awoke
- at the moment of dawn
- and thought of long-lost
- rooster voices quaking
- the golden straw. She
- looks over at you, sleeping,
- and what can I tell you, she loves
- you, but like a friend.
- Eventually, when lost
- in a forest with a friendly chicken
- you make a point of emerging
- from the woods together,
- triumphant; her, fat with bugs,
- you, lean with berries.
- Still, while you yet wander,
- you can not resist telling her
- your joke:
- Guy sees a pig with three legs,
- asks the farmer, What gives?
- Farmer says, That pig woke
- my family from a fire, got us all out.
- Says the guy, And lost the leg thereby?
- Nope, says the farmer,
- Still had all four when he took
- a bullet for me when I had
- my little struggle with the law.
- Guy nods, So that’s where
- he lost his paw? Farmer shakes
- it off, says, Nah, we fixed him up.
- A pause, guy says, So how’d he lose
- the leg? Farmer says, Well, hell,
- a pig like that
- you don’t eat all at once.
- Chicken squints. Doesn’t think
- it’s funny.
About the Poet
Jennifer Michael Hecht (contemporary) is a U.S. author, poet, philosopher and historian. Her scholarly articles and poetry have been published in many journals and magazines. Hecht has also written columns and book reviews for The New York Times. Other book reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The American Scholar and other publications.
Hecht earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science and European Cultural History from Columbia University in 1995. She teaches at The New School University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband John, and their two children. [DES-7/09]
Additional information:
- www.jennifermichaelhecht.com/
- The Lion and the Honeycomb
- Books:
- The Happiness Myth (Harper One, 2007).
- Funny (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
- Doubt: A History (Harper San Francisco, 2003).
- The End of the Soul (Columbia University Press, 2003).
- The Next Ancient World (Tupelo Press, 2001).