"Animals Are Passing from our Lives" by Philip Levine

ANIMALS ARE PASSING
FROM OUR LIVES

It’s wonderful how I jog

on four honed-down ivory toes

my massive buttocks slipping

like oiled parts with each light step.

I’m to market. I can smell

the sour, grooved block, I can smell

the blade that opens the hole

and the pudgy white fingers

that shake out the intestines

like a hankie. In my dreams

the snouts drool on the marble,

suffering children, suffering flies,

suffering the consumers

who won’t meet their steady eyes

for fear they could see. The boy

who drives me along believes

that any moment I’ll fall

on my side and drum my toes

like a typewriter or squeal

and shit like a new housewife

discovering television,

or that I’ll turn like a beast

cleverly to hook his teeth

with my teeth. No. Not this pig.

Source of the text – Philip Levine, New Selected Poems.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, page 36.

TJB: No going wee wee wee all the way home. Nursery rhyme-like, its rhythm building, this poem sees through the eyes of a pig & speaks strongly in refusal.