Butcher Song
Blitz of sun off blade, 6 a.m., Phạm Văn Hai Street, the butcher
drags two glinting metal bowls onto the sidewalk,
hacks tendons, ligaments, fibrous tetherings of muscle and bone,
piling one basin with dwindling carcass parts,
the other a growing scramble of ingredients.
Scrimmage of shrieking reds, milky fats dull as cataracted sight —
O! the beauty of pig guts, that sticky mess of flesh, blood, and viscera
that enables trotting, rooting, nursing, ear-flicking a fly while asleep.
For humans, all habitats are natural habitats.
Sugarcane stalks husked in gutters, roosters in wire cages pecking corn,
freshly lacquered teak chairs drying on sidewalks while wheelbarrows pass
hauling steaming asphalt for potholes born by the perpetual pounding of steel and rubber.
Like clouds drifting over highland forests, how not to let my mind drift
to rubber plantations, the trunks weeping a viscid white sap
concocted millennia ago to guard leaves, seeds, roots,
now planted in rows, routinely gashed into, slashes deep enough
to pain, but not kill, the way life’s trivial anguishes cut us
until we become skeptical of smiles.
Without rubber, our condoms would still be made from pig intestines.
Pigs too have sex for pleasure’s sake, but do so with no concern for the future;
theirs is a simple world where the night sky harbors no metaphors.
Last night, I dined on their flesh at a street-side restaurant with a woman
who swears humans have rid themselves of their animal natures,
subdued them with laws and buildings, books, clothes, and gods.
I watched closely as she sucked the marrow from a soup bone.
Later, the same lips pressed against mine while I was inside her,
a thin sheath of rubber between us, while overhead the moon,
that great whetting stone, polished sunbeams
that painlessly slashed our beastly bodies