Their Every Yellow Leaf #poem #NewOhioReview

Aspen leaves still green but ever fluttery.

https://budburst.org/plants/38

Their Every Yellow Leaf

 

Jacinth looks at the pig and 

asks what she did in another lifetime

to be so beautiful. 

Maybe not everyone would see it

but she’s perfect.

I am not everyone. I agree. 

Alice is perfect, 

a hippopotamus made compact. 

I stroke her dark hide and feed her 

fruit cup from breakfast. 

Cauliflower and a toasted bagel. 

Plum jam. 

With the pig, Jacinth 

and I break bread. 

Jacob, who is new to this poem,

buries his cigarette in a late Fall lawn 

to take a call from Quebec. 

In bright sunlight Alice considers

eternally recycling life. Is my guess. 

Jacinth has no interest in me or Jacob 

and praises only the pig, who is complete. 

Is her guess. The heart gets lonely 

some days. Is Jacob’s guess. 

Feeding Alice renders longing and irritation 

irrelevant, without obliterating either. 

Aspens snap their every yellow leaf. 

The trees expected we’d be gone by now. 

Their every yellow leaves don’t guess. 

 

Thank you to the editors of New Ohio Review, 2023 for selecting this poem.

Swinherd by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin & a Levi-Strauss quote on pig qua meditation prop

Many ways to view paradise, old age, the gentle glory of appreciation. On a website dedicated to "Considering the pig, a single-minded bestiary" {porkopolis.org} I found "Swineherd" by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin; and while this reflection on the gentle glory of appreciation, anticipation, age, whatever else, needs no accompaniment, the website itself charms and so I offer another of treasures, being a quotation:   

In our thoughts and words, pigs are generous figures of speech.  They freely lend their intrinsic nature to us for simile and metaphor, hyperbole and idio.  Pigs are also handy to use in personification or in analogy and allergory. And pigs are certainly good for swearing.     

Claude Levi-Strauss, Totenism, 1963 ... read the rest of the quote here.

And Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's poem:

Swineherd

1. When all this is over, said the swineherd,
2. I mean to retire, where
3. Nobody will have heard about my special skills
4. And conversation is mainly about the weather.
6. I intend to learn how to make coffee, as least as well
7. As the Portuguese lay-sister in the kitchen
8. And polish the brass fenders every day.
9. I want to lie awake at night
10. Listening to cream crawling to the top of the jug
11. And the water lying soft in the cistern.
13. I want to see an orchard where the trees grow in straight lines
14. And the yellow fox finds shelter between the navy-blue trunks,
15. Where it gets dark early in summer
16. And the apple-blossom is allowed to wither on the bough.

© Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Acts and Monuments. Dublin, The Gallery Press, 1972.