I Hear the Continents Are Drifting Like Great Granite Pirates, and: Two Pigs, and: The Flatness of Memory, and: Dogs May Smell God, and: Failed Ransom

I Hear the Continents Are Drifting Like Great Granite Pirates

I hear the continents are drifting like great granite piratesand that matter hangs like a tapestry        whose threads are wove through vacuum,that birds are fragments of dinosaurs andwhales invented algebra,        and I believe it        all for the sake of wonder.

And if philosophy might be science with a leaning toward hyperbole,if paleontology could cohabit with quantum field theory        and plate tectonics meld with ethnomusicology (shanties, specifically),if mathematics joined hands with cetology,if we cared to make a whole of all we knew in part,        then birds are heirs to brontosaurs        and whales taught Newton calculus       —logic weds with art,        and wonder, like a weed the garden needed, grows through all we know.

Two Pigs

I'll introduce you to two friends of mine;I think they are, though they never met me.I think that because I think about them all the time,and I think about them kindly and lovingly;in one case, at least, I feel haunted.

State Fair pens. Maryland, probably.It's been a while, now, so I don't know.Stall after stall, I stroll under stark electric light.Aisle on aisle, pen upon pen, animals lying or standing,milling if they have the room. Shadows, hay, wood, smell of manure.Sharp-shouldered milk cows with flesh so weightythe bones seem ready to rip right through;big-balled bulls with knee-length scrotumswhose pendulum swing, with any undulation,could send them knocking between the ratherclose-together knees.

Down the avenue of pigs. Near the endI see a small (presumably young) pig having a shit.It falls before it's entirely out. The remainder,unallured by pen floor or by gravity, hangs.I watch for several minutes and feel a tendernessindependent of kinship taxonomically construed.I struggle to believe I can make you see it: a personal,ordinary, individual act; the pig vulnerable in that moment—from a perspective defective in kindness, one given to ridicule("cigar butt" comes to mind [not mine, of course])—susceptible, certainly, to misperception.The kinship ends, I guess, in its inability to wipe.But I have loved that individual since that night and, through it,began to love all pigs.

The next tale is more difficult to tell. I don't know how to say what I sawbecause what I saw was so simple and so unexpected.I followed a pig truck up the highway, directly behind.Near the back, somehow, there was room for one. A single pig had stuck its head out, taking in the highway, the traffic,the passing trees, the sky large and blue overhead, the wind, the scents,marveling, I think, as I might, out in the open, the alive,the world hitting it in the face at sixty miles an hour.I love the poet I saw in that pig, the philosopher, handicapped, it may be,by an intellect only a little below our own, but striving to know,in fullest measure, in all the time remaining, what wonder had revealed.How are we different?

There are moments when we're foolishand moments when we're most alive.Between us, please tell mehow we are different.

The Flatness of Memory

"That will take forever!""It's like it happened yesterday!"Time, long to look through prospectively,collapses to a single depth on looking back.

In memory, we store time flat—indexed, of course, so we know what followed what.Recollections, roughly equally accessible,lack the thickness of anticipation, though,of range exceeding reach. So the centenarianhas no more sense of the fullness of time behind himthan does a child facing an end prematurely met.Though you'll forever be unready, then, the other side is this:Whenever you go, you'll have had as much life as anyone ever gets.

(If you think, as I think you must, if you're...