Poetry Lesson #1
You must control, or else
they pull you down
he cracks the rubber hose
over the stud boar’s snout
its darkly poodled hide
dense as a briar
tusks muddied of the mushroom feast
Riccio bullies it through clanking rebar
towards drooling sows
the breed is of his land 600
calving seasons back, and humped
and mean as short-chain dogs
you smell them in the fields
as in the pan, just the same
or wilder—Riccio pins them
scalpel-still against the earth
for fixing, beats them calm
before the morning slop
and balances their sleeping grins
the crowns of man-sized boiling vats
for grinding. He loves and names each one
sews tattered ears and toothed-out eyes
Madonne, the goddamn
Tuscan breeds don’t earn
no penny. they taste too wild
kill they own babies, break the fence
but what is mine is mine
and everybody need to make
what is they own to make.
me, I never eat a pink pig.
What does “Madonne” mean?
It’s an Italian expletive that Riccio would salt his speech with.. it means “Madonna” (i.e. the virgin mary)
Right. Thanks.
In that case… I dig the piece. The voice rings true for me, I sailed through the transitions. Interesting avoidance of quotes. Only thing I’d pick on is ‘but what is…’ might sound more authentic if it’s ‘what’s’. But, I haven’t read it aloud to anyone yet. Just something to think about.
Thanks for the close-reading and input, Max. I agree with you, the “but what is” sounds too precise.. problem is that these guys usually didn’t do well with contractions. They never said “what’s” or “didn’t”, and they hit the “to be” verb (is) pretty hard in their declension. SO.. I was considering using “but, what is my is my”, which is a syntactical mistake they often made, but didn’t want it to sound too forced or clownish. Still thinking about it.