Porter, Peter

Australia, (1929-2010)

Pig In The Middle

  1. Wallowing in luxury lay
  2. A Most Important Pig–
  3. Cornelius, Top Pig of the Year–
  4. Pink and White, bacon-rich Cornelius!
  5. Where a couple of weeks ago lissom young ladies
  6. Were competing for Miss World,
  7. Cornelius basked under camera lights
  8. Like an odalisque in a Turkish harem.
  9. ‘What a clean pig’, we all exclaimed.
  10. ‘O very clean’, they answered, ‘we washed him
  11. For his debut in detergent.’
  12. Cornelius is the first MDH
  13. (Minimal Disease Hybrid).
  14. Fat and fancy Cornelius grew to bacon-
  15. Slicing size in only one hundred and twenty-nine days.
  16. He derives from high-bred Landrace
  17. And Large White parents. He wasn’t born,
  18. He was removed from his mother by hysterectomy.
  19. His upbringing (bottlefed with a minutely balanced diet)
  20. Ensured against infections which pigs are prone to
  21. From the moment of his birth.
  22. His cereal and fish-meal feed
  23. Was carefully tinctured
  24. With chalk, copper, zinc, molybdenum and other minerals.
  25. For every 21/2 pounds of food he ate
  26. He put on more than a pound in weight.
  27. But what about flavour?
  28. Age and exercise put flavour into meat,
  29. But the hard facts of farm economics
  30. And a reasonable price for the housewife
  31. Means animals must be grown fast and killed young.
  32. Poor Cornelius!
  33. He is the only pig that ever wallowed
  34. In Waldorf luxury.
  35. His debut in the Aldwych Suite cost £50,
  36. All to make a better British breakfast.

 Peter Porter. Collected poems: Volume I (1961-1981). Oxford: Oxford University Press (1983).

On The Train Between Wellington And Shrewsbury

  1. The process starts–
  2. on the rails pigs’ blood,
  3. lambs’ blood in the trees
  4.  
  5. With a red tail
  6. through the slab-white sky
  7. the blood bird flies
  8.  
  9. This man beside me
  10. is offering friendly
  11. sandwiches of speech:
  12. he’s slaughtered twenty pigs
  13. this morning–
  14.  
  15. he takes away
  16. the sins of the word
  17.  
  18. I can smell his jacket,
  19. it’s tripe-coloured,
  20. old tripe,
  21. drained-out, veteran tripe
  22. that has digested the world
  23.  
  24. I shut my eyes on
  25. his lullaby of tripe
  26. and the blood goes back to bed
  27.  
  28. (Someone’s got to do it
  29. and I’m grateful
  30. and my neighbour’s grateful
  31. and we say so,
  32. but thank God it’s only
  33. fourteen minutes to Shrewsbury)
  34.  
  35. Fourteen minutes to consider
  36. the girl reading Scott Fitzgerald–
  37. she has a red cashmere top
  38. bright as a butcher’s window
  39.  
  40. Shut out the sun and the cameras–
  41. I want to talk to a doctor
  42. about Circe’s magic circle–
  43. ‘you see, it was on the woman herself
  44. the bristles sprang
  45. and the truffle-hunting tongue’
  46.  
  47. What is it makes my penis
  48. presentable?
  49. hot blood–
  50. enough of it, in the right place
  51.  
  52. With such red cheeks
  53. my interlocutor from the abattoirs
  54. must have hypertension
  55.  
  56. On his knees he has
  57. a lumpish parcel, well-knotted
  58. with white string–
  59. it makes all the difference
  60. when you know it’s really fresh
  61.  
  62. At one time our species
  63. always had it fresh;
  64. one time there were no cashmere tops
  65. or butcher’s shops
  66.  
  67. It consoles me that poems
  68. bring nothing about,
  69. it hurts me that poems
  70. do so little
  71.  
  72. I was born after
  73. man invented meat
  74. and a shepherd invented poetry
  75.  
  76. At a time when there are only
  77. fourteen killing minutes
  78. between Wellington and Shrewsbury.

 Peter Porter. Collected poems: Volume I (1961-1981). Oxford: Oxford University Press (1983).

Neighbours

  1. I am Ceccho de Cecchi
  2. who died in 1493
  3. and I apologize now
  4. for troubling you.
  5. This is my chance to speak,
  6. all because a book
  7. is open at my entry–
  8. that’s my name, a key
  9. record for the month, but nobody’s
  10. heard of me I’ve been dead
  11. so long. I was important, I led
  12. a useful life and was a devout
  13. Christian, true husband and
  14. a businessman of good repute.
  15. You who read my name,
  16. quite a few of you will be nobodies
  17. compared to me–please
  18. understand how I long
  19. in this dark to be back among
  20. my fellows and my reputation,
  21. how lonely it is here
  22. where we are forgotten. Days, I know,
  23. must lengthen into shadow,
  24. but let me talk to you.
  25. I remember we’d sing Mass
  26. and beyond our voices we would hear
  27. the cries of pigs being slaughtered
  28. for the coming feast. We listened
  29. to our own ends but we felt
  30. only the excellent wind
  31. of fortune which fans the young.
  32. Now time has torn out my tongue.
  33. On the opposite page, level with me,
  34. is another faded entry–
  35. for October 1492–
  36. in the Libro dei Morti
  37. of Borgo San Sepolcro–
  38. ‘died on the twelfth, Piero
  39. di Benedetto di Francesco,
  40. painter’. Pray for me
  41. and for all immortality.

 Peter Porter. Collected poems: Volume 2 (1984-1999). Oxford: Oxford University Press (1983).

About the Poet:

Peter Neville Frederick Porter, Australia, (1929-2010), was a British-based Australian poet. Although he resided in London after 1951, Porter’s writing did not loose its Australian tone. An erudite poet with a vast knowledge of European cultural history, Porter’s work could range from complex philosophical explorations to deeply moving personal subjects, while his generous irony and humour is usually tinged with seriousness.

Porter was first published in 1961. Since then he published sixteen collections and much journalism. He also collaborated with visual arts performances and was Writer-in-Residence at several universities, including Hull, Reading, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Sydney. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, won the Duff Cooper and the Whitbread prizes, and was the subject of a special issue of Poetry Review. [DES-04/18]

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