"Fabroni says that swine lose the use of their limbs, and become pitiable monsters by eating this flower [Lathyrus Purpureo]."
--A.B. Strong, M.D., The American Flora (1855)

Pity is
as pity does.

"Swine" is on
the facing page
to "Sweet Pea."

In Popeye
there's a bulb-headed
drooling baby Swee'pea
all in white, legless
in a nightshirt like fog.

Pigs seem pitiable
and monstrous anyway,
to me: reddish-hairy
or pearl-grey-sleek
thinning like hopes
brushed to the pink
skin after scalding.

Turkeys are seasonal.
Pigs are always subject:

their cannibalism
is lately in the news
for blizzards in the North.

Cattle just wallow and die
for their oppression
(not of shock, for that
implies some form of ecstasy,
high death from within):

they mortify
by circumstance,
necks deep in drifts
when earth and sky
are just in reach.

They lunge and flail
like scholastics lost
in a sudden dream
of robes and ropes.

Sweet peas are colored variously.
I remember only pastels, however.

I'm inexact in my details,
but I insist on them as they are:
like Dickey, with oviparous rattlers
(nabbed by a critic whose name escapes me),
or Coleridge, whose star resides
between the horns of the crescent moon.

That way perhaps
lies power.

Some details are right
when hearts are wrong: good
hearts sometimes loosely
at the mercy of facts:

under formidable drifts, the light
seeping a blue distance, tunneling
the soft sub-crust, glaring past
their spoonish snouts, pigs
on strong and tilting limbs
are going to eat their own.