Canada, (b. 1951)
Rondeau of a Swineherd
- Pigs sniffling then snorting in dust of their chop
- Rooting and sneezing like snuff takers in straw
- They’d run, leap in circles, and then they would stop
- To stare at whatever it was that they saw.
- My father in workpants with twine for a draw
- Banged the boards with his hands that made the chaff drop
- Midst, froze for a moment before they would thaw,
- Pigs sniffling then snorting in dust of their chop.
- In dry corners sleeping so warmly they’d flop
- And I’d bring them all humped, dragged down with a claw
- Their bedding shook free where they’d wake and then hop
- Or rooting and sneezing like snuff takers in straw.
- And I’d give too-close ones a kick in the jaw
- So they’d race the pen while their trotters clip clop
- On cement churned up for a game in the flaw
- They’d run,leap in circles, and then they would stop.
- But Tom, the man hired to muck out their slop,
- Hated mostly those pigs, which stuck in his craw.
- He’d slap out his fork with a soft side-tined fop
- If they dared stare at what it was that they saw.
Red Barns
- Last century
- there was blood in the paint
- on the boards of these barns.
- Ontario, I have seen
- the bleeding of a slaughtered sky
- in the western hemorrhage
- at the death of day
- in the morbid menses
- of a moon-timed afternoon
- and thought of beauty dying
- where it rubs the world away
- in that the last of light
- while somewhere else along the waking curve
- young hours
- warm the latches
- on a dreaming door
- and though a distant window sulks with rain
- and pond mist
- drifts like something burning slow
- among the singing fogs
- the blackbird’s flashing wing
- wags off the weed in flame
- and dove flutes
- mourn their flight
- ah, moralizing angels, pass above these mortal barns
- they bear the proof of lambs
- gone silent on our knives
- they have the memory of hog’s lament
- the sorrowing away
- of market sows
- the knackered beast
- who proves his barrow’s heart
- is emptied as a well-squeezed rag
- and all the sweeter crimson drums
- have dripped dark zeroes full to the flux
- that’s quivered to final stillness in the ox
- as thirsty cedar waits
- to the very mow-boards
- of these family farms
- we’ve ghosts enough
- to last us into unborn dust
- make ashy berms from all romance
- the fertile strangers yet to meet
- and couple and decline
- and this an awful art
- behold the pigment of each generation’s fate
- red barns have much to expiate.
The Corpselessness of Memory
- Pigs can’t sweat and
- it was 5 days at the CNE show barn
- upstairs
- 5 days with the thermometer reading 100 plus
- then bursting
- like an aneurism all red die
- and throbbing apoplectic glass.
- Piglets panting like lap dogs
- sows lying importantly in clean straw
- and shoats sluggishly checking their pens
- then flopping
- with their eyes open
- desperate with torpor.
- One ignorant swineherd
- poured a pail of cold water
- over a prize boar’s back to cool him
- but his heart exploded in his chest
- and he lay dying like Jim Morrison
- in an ice-cube bath in Paris,
- but not half so romantic …
- This hog
- lay finally with all the symptoms of death
- heavy as a small planet
- his body a noiseless crowd of soft still organs
- till he stiffened
- like a Victorian church warden
- and the heat wave broke
- in the empty barn
- 5 days later
- in the corpselessness of memory.
Those Damned Confederation Poets
- The pigs glide
- in the slickened floor
- roulette
- the hopper
- like bullets
- thumbed one by one from a spun cold chamber.
- I’ve seen them there
- playing at the chase
- with the flimsy to and fro
- of Tom the hired man
- busy with their stringy leavings
- rushing so his boot tops
- wibble-wobble their orange hoops
- loose noosing his calves
- till they wear a reddish welt
- in the flesh
- like a tea-kettle burn.
- I’ve seen pigs slide
- like ball players stealing a base
- then bunch, then run again,
- then jump, hover, then slide
- like field beans in a swivelled sieve
- gather into small gruntings
- bump nose, or snout lift a belly
- so it wiffles hock to ham
- like a watery wine skin
- or sneeze in the quick-limed floor
- so their truffling nostrils vomit
- dampish breathy decisions
- in the new straw.
- Then when they settle clean nested
- their ears flip to shake away
- the nursing flies
- and they turn their intelligence to sleep.
- Then Tom could sit in his chair
- smoke and curse their hide
- while his rolled trouser cuffs
- stiffened like stretching cats
- and every muscle
- pumped its black-hearted ache
- with his brain
- policing the hurt of boot movement
- in each blistered toe.
- In his simple dream
- he garottes pigs one by one
- with binder twine
- or plunges his four manure tines
- till the pink skin
- is pimpled with wounds.
- So much for the romance of work.
- So much for those damned Confederation poets
- who would have made
- farmers of us all.
About the Poet:
John Busteed Lee (b.1951), Canadian poet, fiction and non-fiction author and editor. He was appointed Poet Laureate of the City of Brantford in perpetuity in 2005 and was Poet Laureate of Norfolk County, 2010–2014.
Lee is a member of the Chancellor’s Circle of the President’s Club of McMaster University And a recipient of over seventy prestigious international awards for his writing. He is winner of the $10,000 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, the only two time recipient of the People’s Poetry Award, and 2006 winner of the inaugural Souwesto Writing Award (University of Windsor/Black Moss Press) .
Lee has well-over sixty books published to date and is the editor of seven anthologies. He lives in Port Dover, Ontario, Canada where he works as a full time author. [DES-06/14]
Additional information:
- Official Website of Award Winning Canadian Poet & Writer John B. Lee
- Canadian Poetry Online – John B. Lee
- The Ontario Poetry Society – John B. Lee
- John B. Lee reads “We Mousy” by Robbie Burns on Youtube (no pigs, just a fav of the Editor here).