The first hints of winter are moving through Ashburton, and the need for rest, incubation, nourishment, hot baths,lamb shank-all the good stuff. Here's what i imagine is the final of that Pig Poem i have been working on for the Pig Poetry anthology (out spring 2010). Its language is cramped and strange, but what else is new?


THE BRINY TUSK
(for the Boar and the Gut)

The briny tusk doesn't live on plates!
It curls its legacy around
Its fur-bellied apostle
My gut
That powerjut of defiance
Taunting the mirror
But oddly joyful

The high squeal and lust-salt of its flesh
Belong to the rain soaked God of the Greeks,
Y'know that one, clutching his grapes and leopard,
Born from the thigh of the Thunderbolt.
So the pig is rich in rank, rutting the Olympians,
causing voracious nibbles at English fayres.

And he's low, an erotic rustle through dark grass,
A preacher waving a gun,
A midnight reprieve from a vegan jail,
his flesh stiff leather round our all-to-tender bones.

They tell us to eat it is to play with death,
To jump three steps towards the slippery curb,
A throbbing stumble to indecent joys, snuffling ankles,
and Sundays counting the hard cards of grief.

Wonderful! Where do I sign?

A pig killed an Irish hero
Made sails of his guts
And rode him out into the ebony curls
of an irritable splendour and a foamy repentance.

See? He is tusking my words even now.

So this is no wastrel's flab on me
but a sash of devotion
to the horny, swagger-toothed,
curl-pricked genius of
the fecundant woods.

Other than teaching at the school i will be on a writing sabbatical mostly now till June 2010 when i re-emerge for Robert Bly's Great Mother Conference in New England and a fairly extensive U.S. trip. It's been a very 'out in the world' year, and the need for soul-time- the study, the moors, writing, music,is fairly clamouring at my heart. The great birds of winter are sealing off the tracks to the market place and leading me back to the seeds and dark earth-to incubate and recharge. Delight, delight.There is a book to be written, and the completion of an 120,000 wrd essay five years in the making.

Anyone seen the movie 'The Proposition'? Nick Cave was involved. Up my alley and no mistake-although yet to see the ending-i regret to admit my little lashes flutter downwards after midnight at the moment.