Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Living Mysteries

M A R G A R E T H O L L E Y Living Mysteries Father raised pigs for ham and bacon, the sow so fat with young she lay like a seed pod ready to burst. We held the piglets in our arms like infants, all belly and tiny limbs. Growing out of myself into another age I walked through the fire of the hayfield toward the darkness of the barn, taking forever. I walked through decades, still surrounded by flames, a ripening body of vast inner distances, fifty thousand miles of vessels and capillaries, each month a new moon, a new outer layer of skin. When we sat down to dinner, grandfather carved the glistening roast, windows open, no one watching but us, still eating the old gods, the autumn air pregnant with future, already thick with rumor— destruction of the sanctuary at Eleusis in 400 A.D., its mysteries safe in the everyday clothing of holiness: unobserved acts of kindness, healing of wounds, and slowly down its tendrils spirit descending into the river of blood. 182 ❚ The 1990s ...