Silin-Palmer, Pamela

Ode To A Swine
Convenire cum omni ente

1. Envoi
2.  
3. What pig could himself deny
4. A gently seasoned porky pie?
5. The glistening splay of roasted snout
6. The parslied porcine forefoot:
7. Removed from life, from fat, from flesh
8. Impartial blade made mince, mince, mince,
9. Spread out among the crusts to taste
10. Baked to melt, and melting licked…
11. The silenced throat, the twining tail
12.  
13. 1
14. Pig, I can no longer recall
15. Why I move in this silent circle
16. Toward incurious tomorrow
17. From feast to truffled feast
18. Lurching bellyfuls of lunch:
19. From cottled prune
20. To cuddled egg
21. To fishy creamed and poached,
22. Moving toward the unknown skewer
23. Roasting unknown roasts.
24. Pig pie never tastes the same
25. In winter rain, in summer sun;
26. Winter passed me yesterday
27. Yet winter is to come.
28. Memory marches backward
29. Space flows out the door
30. The mirror face is winking back
31. At the face before;
32. How we try to hang in time
33. Stop the rhythm and the rhyme
34. But the circle rolls us on
35. Until we roll no more.
36.  
37. 2
38. Pig, I rutted in prideful youth once,
39. Pink and squirming
40. I frolicked in mud and straw
41. And knew the joys of trough.
42. Yet I’m tired of my chewing jaw,
43. The dark damp tongue, the eager teeth:
44. I eat to live and live to die,
45. So worm eats man and man eats pie
46. While all the piggies wonder why
47. They supplement the feast:
48. An ancient tale of pig and sprout,
49. The porky pudding, the appled snout
50. (The apple you so liked to taste
51. Now flavors you with prunish grace);
52. What dimpled immortality
53. Your fruited flesh becomes in me.
54.  
55. 3
56. The pig parade is passing by
57. Throatless spectres, eyeless eyes;
58. Gravied growls from swinish jowls
59. Assault me from my pie…
60. Shall I hide my pork in honey?
61. Or disguise with salty soy?
62. Still you’d catch me gnawing on the
63. brawny bones of boar
64. As the everguileless lines of pig
65. Prance through the butcher’s door.
66.  
67. 4
68. Pig, we’re both roly-poly
69. Till sliced down by time’s blind butcher:
70. Dismembered utterances ripple distance
71. As these present time-wound words
72. Like glistening pig-fat melt away.
73. You did not know if,
74. Unaware of subtler aspects
75. Of your posture, walk, and talk,
76. I overlooked your inbred woes
77. Your persistent gaze from tottering toes,
78. The plodding mule ploughing rows
79. The fleet formicae to and fro
80. Vain, vain in your consistencies…
81.  
82. 5
83. But pig, Aha!
84. Should you become grey for my brain
85. Grub for my tum,
86. Or should you simply stop and die
87. Cease to sense, discharge from life,
88. Feed first the raven, then the worm
89. Metamorph to fecund soil
90. Explode in silver fern,
91. Then I would recall
92. Your smallish tusk
93. Your sixteen nipples so evenly placed
94. Your ripe sow-dappled scent of musk
95. Your steaming haunch
96. Your appled face?
97. Or would my portly pig-fed soul
98. Be sucked through space from sound and light
99. Where pig and poet glide together,
100. Soundless through the night?