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28 Turning with the Animals The pig with its twisted prick, The goat cropping A stony slatch of weed between the hills— I take these beasts, Beard and bristle, wag and slouch, For all that sours on the tongue and downer parts. Those days less ironized, before the lockjaw cool, I, too, would wallow In the stews and sties, prodigal against The easy strictures, rattrap beliefs, Fattening on a diet from the dump— Condoms, tin cans, dogmas, rags, and magazines Whose glazed paper decomposed the poems, Where even love comes undone, bioDegradable , below the bray and snout. And I came back stinking to The legends of embrace, the mausoleum pieties. Dreams, darkness, night, death— All the starved familiar names Corrupt what they cannot keep down. They tell too little or too much: Moonlight teasing the vague pages, Or a noon sun counting out Dirt motes on a desk. 29 I want to lie down again With the hog and the he-goat, Brothers of the mud and scarp, Who never bear more than Their own patient weight or, restless, Bargain for a reach of Heaven above the evidence— This colony of odd angels Grounded by desire and design, a homely Mucilage of hams and four hooves Truculent against the starstruck earth, testing The lower limits of the natural law. ...

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