A Handpicked Poem
article by Michael Todd Steffen
This poem is from The Greensboro Review, Spring 2024, Issue 115, awarded the journal’s affiliated Robert Watson Literary Prize.
P I G T H E R A P I S T
by Mark Spero
I find myself with a wide prospect of Iowa.
Everything here is easy
to say, difficult to imagine. A horizon
of corn that tastes like yellow
wallpaper, and such are the reeds
around lakes of excrement. I’m crying
at the beauty, the fertile smells, the fields
of dreams. Below, there is a pilgrimage
of pigs, from their galaxy of mud
to the consigning hug of thick metal
bars and the veiled entrance
of whatever may come. My beautiful view
is shaded by pig tears, sobs shaking
my green expanse, so I come down
to the march, take my place in their pens,
by their sides, and begin to console,
offer a sermon for their unchosen end.
Touch each crusted hoof.
We cannot blame others for their
wants, their needs. Nuzzle each
wet snout. We can find meaning in
purpose. Run fingers through
hairs on each chin. All we get to
choose is how we respond. I find
I am pretty good at preparing pigs
for death, and they are quiet while
plodding toward their short futures.
I never return to my life. This job smells
too sweet. Listen: all grunting stops,
there is only the sizzle of sun on
pink backs.
The sheer oddity of the poem’s subject, announced by its title, “Pig Therapist,” is an undeniable attention-getter. A smile creeps over my face as I begin to think of the incongruity here, of the
subtle, soft-voiced, delicate sensibilities and dim chair-and-sofa décor of psychotherapy—and the rough, crude, noisy, filthy, smelly surround of a pig farm or slaughterhouse. Contrast and paradox account for a good deal of what we designate as the compression of language which gives poetry definition, makes it distinct from the more naturally allotted pace and leisure of creative prose. Poetry’s charms lie largely in the how (how dare) rather than the what that is written to speak, in measure, aloud. The title merely “Pig Therapist” delivers the punch of a whole paragraph, if not several paragraphs, of narrative build-up, nosy description and sleepy hook.
Underlying the jolt and absurdity of the title, on second thought, piercing through appearances, after all, pigs are known to be highly sensitive creatures, in fact. Underneath it all, perhaps they are very adequate subjects for therapy, and in their age-old dilemma with our society as prime animals for slaughter, for death, with a heightened sense of the doom they are herded to. Most of us, even if we haven’t grown up around pigs, have heard of their acute awareness on that final march to becoming sausage, ham, bacon… There’s little more in wilderness or civil husbandry that expresses distress more direly than the squeal of a pig.
That desperate squeal is the sound I want to make when I read the poet’s phrase “lake of excrement,” evoking the drainage around our modern overpopulated highly polluted and toxic animal farms more like factories and the environmental detriment (not to mention animal trauma) caused by these waste lands. The odor pervades the poem to the letter of today’s doom-spelling alphabet. The poem, moreover, exudes the Hitchcock-esque nightmare, the vulnerability of the open spaces across our Midwest farmland—“a wide prospect of Iowa,” which is also a well-known breadbasket of America’s creative writers, as well as election-year caucus seedbed.
Poetry welcomes us the full-body dive into metaphor. At some point we begin to look through the lattice of the poem and see ourselves – our kind – us humans named…we pigs. The poet is our therapist, and it can be the best therapy to be told point blank about our less than most beautiful selves. We see it in those around us, but also entirely available with ourselves, and know what the poet tells us warmly, in italics:
We cannot blame others for their
wants, their needs…
All we get to
choose is how we respond…
Spero’s daintiness is wont to reach us, endearingly and disarmingly as Galway Kinnell’s Saint Francis blessing his sow, reminding us how
everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing…
Spero, perhaps as an individual but also from a tradition and in the throes of a different historical moment, has concluded on a more wry, inevitable note, unsparing about the “sizzle of sun.” The slow heat of a day which does in fact make that last depiction—“pink”—realistic, as the color of pig flesh through their light scrim of hair we kids and grandkids of pig farmers know. The sizzle is also a compression of whatever skillet cooks us our breakfast. It is also the galaxy’s sun in the age of climate change and global warming, which makes it especially dangerous to forget one’s sun screen.
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