But it was hard to remember. Mom talked a lot
About old times back in the East and Grandmother’s house.
She couldn’t remember an East. The East wasn’t real.
There was only the dusty road and moving along.
Although she knew that Mom had worn a silk dress
And gone to a ball, once. There was a picture of Pop
And Mom, looking Eastern, in queer old Eastern clothes.
They weren’t white trash. She knew how to read and figure.
She’d read Macbeth and Beulah and Oliver Twist.
She liked Beulah best but Macbeth would have suited Pop.
Sometimes she wondered what had happened to them,
When Mother used to live in Grandmother’s house
And wear silk dresses, and Father used to read Latin—
When had they started to go just moving along,
And how would it feel to live in Grandmother’s house?
But it was so long ago, so hard to work out
And she liked it this way—she even liked being hiders.
It was exciting, especially when the guns
Coughed in the sky as they had all yesterday,
When Bent hid out in the woods to keep from recruiters,
And you knew there were armies stumbling all around you,
Big, blundering cows of armies, snuffling and tramping
The whole scuffed world with their muddy, lumbering hoofs,
Except the little lost brushpile where you were safe.
There were guns in the sky again today. Big armies.
An army must be fine to look at. But Pop
Would never let her do it or understand.
An army or a mirror. She didn’t know
Which she’d rather find, but whenever she thought of it
The mirror generally won. You could keep a mirror yourself.
She had to call the hogs that afternoon.
You had to call them once or twice a month
And give them food or else they ran too wild
And never came for butchering in the Fall,
Though they lived well enough without your calling,
Fat in the forest, feeding on beech mast,
Wild muscadines and forest provender
That made their flesh taste sweet as hazelnuts.
She liked the hogs, they weren’t tame, sleepy hogs
Grunting in a black wallow, they were proud
Rapid and harsh and savage as Macbeth.
There was a young boar that she called Macbeth,
She’d seen him fight grey-bristled, drowsy Duncan
And drive him from the trough. Fagin was there,
Bill Sikes was there and Beulah the black sow,
And Lady Macduff whose grunt was half a whine.
You could learn lots about a book from hogs.
She poured the swill and cupped her hands to call.
Sometimes they’d help her with it, Pop or Bent,
But Pop was off with Bent this afternoon
And Mom was always busy. Slim and straight
She stood before the snake-rail pen that kept
Macbeths on their own proper side of the fence.
“Piggy,” she called. “Here, piggy, piggy, piggy!”
It wasn’t the proper call, but the hogs knew
That sweet clear loudness with its sleepy silver
Trembling against a chanter of white ash.
“Here, piggy, piggy, piggy, piggy, piggy!
Here, piggy, piggy!” There was a scrambling noise
At the edge of the woods. “Here, piggy!” It was Banquo.
Greedy, but hesitant. The Artful Dodger
Slim, black and wicked, had two feet in the trough
Before that obese indecision moved.
“Here, piggy! Here, piggy, piggy!” The gleaming call
Floated the air like a bright glassy bubble,
Far, far, with its clean silver and white ash.
And Ellyat, lost and desperate in the wood,
Heard it, desirous as the elvish blast
Wound on a tiny horn of magic grass
To witch steel riders into a green hill.
He stumbled toward its music. “Piggy, piggy,
Here, piggy, piggy,” The swine grunted and jostled.
Melora watched them, trying to count them up
With grave eyes, brown as nuts in rainwater.
They were all there, she thought—she must be sure.
She called again. No, something moved in the woods.
She stared past the clearing, puzzled. So Ellyat saw her
Beyond the swine, head lifted like a dark foal
That listens softly for strangeness. And she saw
An incoherent scarecrow in blue clothes
Stagger on wooden feet from the deep wood.
She called to him to keep away from the hogs,
Half-frightenedly. He did not hear or obey.
He was out of Nibelung Hall. She put one hand
On the rail of the fence to steady herself and waited.
“You can’t come in here,” she said, fiercely. “The hogs’ll kill you.”
But he was past the fed hogs and over the fence.
She saw a queer look on his face. “You’re hungry,” she said.
He grinned, made a noise in his throat, and fell, trying to touch her.
Now that I am clean again,
Now I’ve slept and fed,
How shall I remember when
I was someone dead?
Now the balm has worked its art
And the gashes dry,
And the lizard at my heart
Has a sleepy eye,
How shall I remember yet
Freezing underground,
With the wakened lizard set
To the living wound?
Do not ponder the offence
Nor reject the sore,
Do not tear the cerements
Flesh may need once more.
Cold comes back and pain comes back
And the lizard, too.
And the burden in the sack
May be meant for you.
Do not play the risen dunce
With unrisen men.
Lazarus was risen once
But earth gaped again.
So Ellyat swam back to life, swam back to warmth
And the smell of cooking food. It was night. He heard
Impenetrable rain shake a low roof
And hiss stray, scattering drops on an open fire.
But he was safe. That rain was caged in the sky.
It could not fall on him. He lay in a lax
Idleness, warm and hungry, not wanting to move.
A grub in a close cocoon neither bold nor wise, but content.
A tall woman was cooking mush in an iron pot.
The smell of the mush was beautiful, the shape of the pot
More beautiful than an urn by sea-nymphs carved
From sunken marbles stained with the cold sea-rose.
The woman was a great Norn, in her pot she cooked a new world,
Made of pure vapors and the juices of unspoilt light,
A new globe of sulliless amber and grains of white corn,
An orbed perfection. All life was beautiful now.
A girl came into the room upon light, quick feet.
He stared at her, solemnly. She was young and thin.
The small, just head was set on the slender neck
With a clean sureness. The
