Two Poems 0 comments

Pattiann Rogers

Whence and the Keeper

The Milky Way was created
by a herd of white horses
set loose, rearing and kicking,
galloping through the desert night,
leaving their white hoof prints
by the thousands upon thousands
across the empty black sands.

The Milky Way is a river of rising
rapids and frothy currents cresting
around bends, surging over white
boulders. It is a bridge of shining
ice cracking to pieces, slivers, chips,
gems, above a bottomless gorge.

That glowing arc, that band
of light is as ceremonious
as a congregation of luminous
plankton in a swirl of ocean current.
It is as devoted as a prayer
of pilgrims with lighted lanterns
moving across a barren valley
and up a steep mountain
to a future shrine.

Everything I see of the heavens,
I know by the earth. The Milky
Way is a pinwheel with four
spiraling arms composed of young
blue stars, old red stars at its bulging
center, and older citizen stars
of the ancient halo surrounding.

It protests war like a highway
of crushed and shattered bones,
promises like an avenue
of white violets and Easter lilies
laid for a passing corpse, floats
like a field of dandelion hairs
and spinning milkweed wings
scattered by a gust of cosmic
wind, sinks casually like coins
and strings of pearls tossed
from a carnival barge into the night.
By the earth I see whatever I see.

Boar: Even Though

He stumps along on his cloven hooves,
his midget legs, bulging, fat, three-hundred-pound
pig, gorgeous, huge porker, jiggling
hams and haunches. He’s surfeit,
an abundance of lean muscle and pure
lard, old feast in himself, a perfectly
fulfilled purpose in the flesh.

He stands for all of his swine relatives
and ancient ancestors of ten thousand
years—warthog, bush pig, white-lipped
peccary, wooly boar, javelina, bristled
tuskers, acorn shovelers, river
swimmers, acute detectors of thunder
and lightning two days away, keen
routers of hidden truffles and tubers.

He adores his pignut hickories. He adores
his sows and their wallows.
He can sprint as fast as a squirrel.
Rolling and rooting, settling
into sleep, his great breathing body
inside his grass nest is such a mound
of steady heaving someone might believe
a hillock of forest were quaking to life.

His rumbling, guttural, reverberating
bass snorting, rising from the subterranean
depths of his barrel chest, is the kettle
drum roll of the generous earth
announcing its bounty: Here he is.
He eats anything—fungi, grasshoppers,
grains and garbage, eggs, snakes,
mollusks, birds, bark, manure.

Forgive his stink, forgive his beady,
squinty eyes, his ears like stiff hairy
handkerchiefs hanging over his brow,
his jutting teeth, his dripping digging
snout; for he possesses an intriguing
skull, a brain much superior to a cow
or a dog's. And he is senior sire
of countless progeny, his seed so
multiplied “as the stars of the heaven.”
He is provision. He nourishes.

Waddle-trotting away now, see
how his tail in its coil is laughing
at everything he turns his back on.