Dirty Sex: Pigs and Truffles

5a-androst-16-en-3a-ol means I love you in pig language. Not to be confused with Pig Latin, which is the language my mother and grandmother spoke when they wanted to talk about my grandfather who had gone to jail, gotten out, and been shot by the olice pay because he tried to ob ray an ar bay for a ink dray. There was no lust left in the folds of my grandmother's upper arms. Not in her weekly hairdressed hair. Not in her waistless mumus. She might have desired truffles. Everyone loves truffles. Not everyone gets to taste them.

5a-androst-16-en-3a-ol is the chemical name for the smell of truffles. A musky odor produced in the testes of boars and secreted through their saliva foam when they're courting female boars. If there is enough 5a-androst-16-en-3a-ol lingering in the air for the female boar, if she finds the boar in other ways inoffensive, she'll stand—frozen in place with her ears cocked. She is ready for the boar.

Animal husbandry experts advise that you provide special rooms for mating. The boar should, when he's a few months old, begin servicing the sow only once a week. He might be able to service different sows up to six times a week but never more than two days consecutively which means sometimes, the boar must perform a couple of times a day in order to get a day off. He should ejaculate for no less than three minutes or you should consider the mating "doubtful." Provide a smooth hard floor to provide stability to the boar's hind legs so he does not slip down or out. Also, young boars may mistake the rectum for the vagina. Please provide the boar guidance.¹

Neither stories about grandmas nor stories about pig sex are sexy. Pig Latin is not sexy and the letter and number combination 5a-androst-16-en-3a-ol is not sexy. But truffles might be sexy. And truffle hunting, even with pigs, might be sexy.

In the forest, away from pens and hard, smooth but not slippery floors, pigs will sniff out truffles. The pig, as big as a man, bigger, pink as some Caucasians, as delicate, when trotting along the soft, rough forest floor, as a ballerina on point—those toes are tiny. The truffle pig, his pink skin mottled with Rorschach ink, reveals what the forest floor's subconscious has been hiding.

Is it research or is it my own memory that argues men are turned on by pictures and women by stories? How can we tell the difference? Don't women just turn the words into pictures? Perhaps it is the friction between pictures and words that turns women on. Perhaps words are like the chemical 5a-androst-16-en-3a-ol and saying sexy words aloud is an incantation. It puffs pheromones. In my poetry classes, especially the ones taught by men, we elevated lyric over narrative. The lyric made a song and the song a siren sound of lust. There were poems that read "Sea gespanieled hopscotch breath"—even the past tense of the pretend Germanic "gespaniel" was seen as hypotaxically normative. Oh men and their missionary positions. Is normative sentence structure sexy? The syntax maintains cultural expectations. Nouns do things to objects. But what can we objects do back to our nouns? Where can we find love? In Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Windhover," parataxis, a syntax that connects by 'and' instead of full-stop periods, decimates the hierarchical hypotaxic, noun-penetrating object, hyphens linking nouns, verbs, adjectives in a big kite of a syntax. In "The Windhover," everything comes together. It buckles.

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-  dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and stridingHigh there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wingIn his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and...