Australia, (1929-2010)
Pig In The Middle
- Wallowing in luxury lay
- A Most Important Pig–
- Cornelius, Top Pig of the Year–
- Pink and White, bacon-rich Cornelius!
- Where a couple of weeks ago lissom young ladies
- Were competing for Miss World,
- Cornelius basked under camera lights
- Like an odalisque in a Turkish harem.
- ‘What a clean pig’, we all exclaimed.
- ‘O very clean’, they answered, ‘we washed him
- For his debut in detergent.’
- Cornelius is the first MDH
- (Minimal Disease Hybrid).
- Fat and fancy Cornelius grew to bacon-
- Slicing size in only one hundred and twenty-nine days.
- He derives from high-bred Landrace
- And Large White parents. He wasn’t born,
- He was removed from his mother by hysterectomy.
- His upbringing (bottlefed with a minutely balanced diet)
- Ensured against infections which pigs are prone to
- From the moment of his birth.
- His cereal and fish-meal feed
- Was carefully tinctured
- With chalk, copper, zinc, molybdenum and other minerals.
- For every 21/2 pounds of food he ate
- He put on more than a pound in weight.
- But what about flavour?
- Age and exercise put flavour into meat,
- But the hard facts of farm economics
- And a reasonable price for the housewife
- Means animals must be grown fast and killed young.
- Poor Cornelius!
- He is the only pig that ever wallowed
- In Waldorf luxury.
- His debut in the Aldwych Suite cost £50,
- All to make a better British breakfast.
On The Train Between Wellington And Shrewsbury
- The process starts–
- on the rails pigs’ blood,
- lambs’ blood in the trees
- With a red tail
- through the slab-white sky
- the blood bird flies
- This man beside me
- is offering friendly
- sandwiches of speech:
- he’s slaughtered twenty pigs
- this morning–
- he takes away
- the sins of the word
- I can smell his jacket,
- it’s tripe-coloured,
- old tripe,
- drained-out, veteran tripe
- that has digested the world
- I shut my eyes on
- his lullaby of tripe
- and the blood goes back to bed
- (Someone’s got to do it
- and I’m grateful
- and my neighbour’s grateful
- and we say so,
- but thank God it’s only
- fourteen minutes to Shrewsbury)
- Fourteen minutes to consider
- the girl reading Scott Fitzgerald–
- she has a red cashmere top
- bright as a butcher’s window
- Shut out the sun and the cameras–
- I want to talk to a doctor
- about Circe’s magic circle–
- ‘you see, it was on the woman herself
- the bristles sprang
- and the truffle-hunting tongue’
- What is it makes my penis
- presentable?
- hot blood–
- enough of it, in the right place
- With such red cheeks
- my interlocutor from the abattoirs
- must have hypertension
- On his knees he has
- a lumpish parcel, well-knotted
- with white string–
- it makes all the difference
- when you know it’s really fresh
- At one time our species
- always had it fresh;
- one time there were no cashmere tops
- or butcher’s shops
- It consoles me that poems
- bring nothing about,
- it hurts me that poems
- do so little
- I was born after
- man invented meat
- and a shepherd invented poetry
- At a time when there are only
- fourteen killing minutes
- between Wellington and Shrewsbury.
Neighbours
- I am Ceccho de Cecchi
- who died in 1493
- and I apologize now
- for troubling you.
- This is my chance to speak,
- all because a book
- is open at my entry–
- that’s my name, a key
- record for the month, but nobody’s
- heard of me I’ve been dead
- so long. I was important, I led
- a useful life and was a devout
- Christian, true husband and
- a businessman of good repute.
- You who read my name,
- quite a few of you will be nobodies
- compared to me–please
- understand how I long
- in this dark to be back among
- my fellows and my reputation,
- how lonely it is here
- where we are forgotten. Days, I know,
- must lengthen into shadow,
- but let me talk to you.
- I remember we’d sing Mass
- and beyond our voices we would hear
- the cries of pigs being slaughtered
- for the coming feast. We listened
- to our own ends but we felt
- only the excellent wind
- of fortune which fans the young.
- Now time has torn out my tongue.
- On the opposite page, level with me,
- is another faded entry–
- for October 1492–
- in the Libro dei Morti
- of Borgo San Sepolcro–
- ‘died on the twelfth, Piero
- di Benedetto di Francesco,
- painter’. Pray for me
- and for all immortality.
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]
Additional information:
- Peter Porter – Australian Poetry Library
- Peter Porter – The Poetry Archive
- Peter Porter obituary – The Guardian