How to Swallow a Pig

by Robert Priest

  TALES OF A DOMESTIC HEART

  I turn off the switch to your heart. Your heart goes out, with no glowing. Your heart, your heart. I have a special blinder, a piece of fine lead for your heart. I have a parasol and sunglasses for your heart. A special myopia developed over years of staring — years of squinting into mirrors searching for beauty. Now I can’t see your heart. O blow it up, my loved one, swell it up and over till it’s everywhere.

  Your heart is squeezed into the corner. It is under the bed. Always scurrying from vision. Your fugitive heart. Silent, obvious. Your huge heart, red and sore. Your angry heart, sick of being silent and invisible. Your heart needs a shake-up. If you redo your heart, then, when it is huge and stuck on a chair weeping, perhaps I will see it. Take off the blinders to your heart. Get your heart out of its scared shell. I want to see your heart. Please send me your heart. Let’s strip your heart.

  When she is angry she throws her heart in the bath. Huge and wooden it just sits there floating, cracking, and splintering. I open the door and say, “Are you all right?” I go over and kiss her heart, burning my lips, forgetting the great heat of her heart. The heart just floats in the bath. I can hear it hissing. Push the heart under — it comes to the surface. I say sorry to her heart. Next, she puts her heart up on a pole in the living room. She walks around looking sullen, doing the dishes. “What’s wrong?” I ask her. “Nothing,” she answers, but the heart swells and lets out a huge crack on top of the pole. I quietly take the heart down from the pole, open the windows and get sunshine on her heart. She is still in the kitchen doing the dishes. Becoming cruel, I put her heart down with the pots and pans and leave her in there, furiously weeping and scrubbing, the heart still beating in the leftover soup. Finally I take her to bed and curl around her heart. I curl around it like a foetus. I curl around it till it is as big as a boulder and I am like a tiny leech, a tiny worm in her heart. I curl around it under the covers until she comes to bed for it. She slips in beside me, deathly cold, her feet like stones, and then in the darkness I open her ribs and slip it in. It will only work for a while — enough for a little peace to make her warm. I put her heart back in behind her breast and I rub her till it is beating madly. I rub her till her heart is stoked and then when it goes off, I go to sleep. In the morning her heart is breaking through again. She takes it with her to work. She keeps it in a purse, in a bell and some cups. In the morning her heart is small and efficient. It is rolled up in leaves and left for the children, left for the winds and workers till she returns. Her heart. Her beautiful heart.

  DOT AND DASH

  A touch of my skin to a touch of hers is added like protoplasmic spice, weird flavours at the edge. And when a finger crosses over and touches a cheek there is a titanic ignition. If we want to become like two sheets of glass smashed together, if we want to be two harps fused in music by a fire-burst, then we must lie in bed and plug in, willing to go up like an entire meadow, a country the size of a field, a bed as small as a river, and float away in flowery silliness. Look and see the large blossoms in the bed then, too big for a room, bent over toward the window and reading poetry together. What I want to do is another experiment — hurl my matter at hers at great speed, setting off a hairy star, another wide-limbed sun-shriek that lets out the dark corners of the room, like a message to the stars each time a tongue touches a tongue.

  DIFFICULT HEAVEN

  Difficult heaven — a drop of rain — slides down the window held up only by friction, the buoyancy of earth-air. My beloved has a difficult heaven in her thighs and I am the window holding her up for as long as I can. Soon she will be one with the dew, one with the water running rivulets down houses and streets to streams. Soon she will be one with the ocean, crashing down and flattening out to a long streaming run up a beach. She and I keep afloat a difficult heaven by much heavy breathing, by many big words and miraculous acts. I can hold up the sea on the tip of my tongue. I can pierce through a globe of dew and see a whole world come apart with a groan, everything sliding in its flat wash, wild, up a smooth beach. We are careening jugs, great urns of oil being spilled. We are jewels and barley scattered in the tide where gulls pick at us in a frenzy, gone and gone with our legs kicking up. See how the rippling separates the sunset into a thousand flames? Well we are like that — life flows in and casts our light into days and days, our arms upraised, our bodies tributaries to it — reflections that must dance on the tide awhile before they’re drawn back into the lap of time.

  SOMETIMES THERE IS A WAY

  I touch my soul to yours at the mouth and two needles knock in our hearts. Self-absorbing colours mix in heat maps — purple and red turning gold, all the colours of creation flashing through us in neon pulses as we writhe. Aaaaah, give me the touch of my lover’s hand upon my neck like a brush in paint. Give these colours in my head the touch of spirit her eyes will need. Sometimes there is a way. Get your love to lay you down ten miles long and be a lake in the sunset — a long, thin finger lake, a lake that darkens with pain and mystery in the evening, rising up and menacing the cliffs of love. Let your love then lay upon the stillness at the centre of you, a hand that spreads it, calming you out to a lapping and shimmering in a moonlight that is green. Sometimes there is a way out of human agony, my love. Sometimes we can move with kisses dark rivers of pain in the throat. There are regions of sunrise in my being which can break their boundaries and spread if you but touch the key. O I am here to announce that there definitely is a way, and our bodies, our gestures, are maps to it that we must follow like blind ones touching each curve of Braille in ecstasy as we wander along the blond and tawny roads.

  LOVE AS THOUGH

  Your mouth is the first mouth — the mouth I approach from the mountains, from the stars — swooping like a hawk to catch it turning, to catch it white and hot. Ah, breathe down deep into my substance and come away with a memory of the source of things — the river returning on itself with salmon and men. Come down by the falling water in me. Chip off all the old edges of your rigid life and come running again in rocks and waves and winds, till both of us are worn down, eroded to grains of sand, our bodies strewn over a thousand lands, lost in a million winds, on the boots even of the star travelers. Let us unravel mysteries long knotted and entwined on fate’s billion-fingered hand, gnarled about us like these winter trees. Come at last, still patient to the poem in her palm — that simple verse: “Live and be happy.” From one another grow as though from a mutual soil. As though stones could not keep their shape and the moon depended on it. As though it had all come down to our love. Because it all has come down to our love.

  *It is also one of the easiest animals to shove up the anus. This is not recommended for reasons of hygiene.

  *If you want to examine the colours of bullshit more closely yourself, you can safely do this by staring at the coloured pieces of cloth which are used to attach medals to generals’ chests or simply by staring intensely at the flag of almost any country.

  * e.g. “The bees do make the rock the rock. They gather up the pollen to the hive and they do make the sweet rock, the sticky rock the rock the rock the rock.”

  **A Latin term meaning to compose spontaneously.

  *** e.g. “Egypt with your honeyed urns, your flesh like ancient honey, sagging from your wicked old frescoes.”

  ****e.g. “Aaaaah, your long lean neck as white as poverty. Yes, yes I want to pour your beauty into frescoes of poverty. To make from poverty a white model for the ages to come. To say yes poverty is beautiful, but have you seen her flesh . . .”

  Plus: “Bleeders for leaders.” “Salute, salute our great bleeders who have bled us to this mighty pass for we have been bled to the very gates of heaven, to the welcome door of hell, and there is no stopping. Even here, they will continue to bleed us. All along through the dire valleys of death they will bleed us unstintingly waving the red flag high. They will bleed us to the mountaintops and deep into the stinging salt seas. High and outward through the darkening skies we will b
e bled, hardly pausing to look back to see the long way we have come before we turn and face the clear pathways of tomorrow.”