"Animals Are Passing from Our Lives" by Philip Levine
On pigitude, and some health news
Animals Are Passing from Our Lives It's wonderful how I jog on four honed-down ivory toes my massive buttocks slipping like oiled parts with each light step. I'm to market. I can smell the sour, grooved block, I can smell the blade that opens the hole and the pudgy white fingers that shake out the intestines like a hankie. In my dreams the snouts drool on the marble, suffering children, suffering flies, suffering the consumers who won't meet their steady eyes for fear they could see. The boy who drives me along believes that any moment I'll fall on my side and drum my toes like a typewriter or squeal and shit like a new housewife discovering television, or that I'll turn like a beast cleverly to hook his teeth with my teeth. No. Not this pig. —Philip Levine from Not This Pig (Wesleyan UP, 1968)
I was lying on my back on the table of a linear accelerator in a radiation bunker at the hospital on Christmas Day, looking up at the red laser projecting from the ceiling to align one of my four most recent tattoos with the treatment head, when I had the second auditory hallucination of my life. (I wrote about the first one here.) This one may well qualify as a memory rather than an hallucination: it was, unmistakably, the beloved voice of Philip Levine, speaking the last two sentences of “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives”: “No. Not this pig.” I’d wager I heard him, live or in recording, read this poem at least once, but who can say; I know I first read it twenty-five years ago. I can say with certainty that the words came back to me when I may have needed them the most.
This is an unexpected opening for this publication, I guess. I certainly did not expect, when I last hit publish on December 19, that I’d be in the hospital and undergoing urgent radiation therapy five days later, but here we are; having been treated for cancer once, in 2011, the shock wasn’t that it was happening so much as it was that it was happening now. I’ve spent the last seven months learning, on a somatic level, the meaning of now, and the last five relearning my love of poems, and in some ways the timing is exactly right. Before this year I never so clearly understood how little we can control, nor how much we can do in the face of that fact, how simple it is to be present in our lives even if we feel them slipping from us, how meaningful it is to connect with each person we encounter, even when it feels too hard. This is what poetry, I understand now, has meant to me.
What’s to love about “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives”? It’s a dramatic monologue in the voice of a pig, for one, and not just any pig, but a pig of absolute conviction in the face of what’s out of his trotters. He knows where he is headed, yet what pleasure he takes in the movement of his piggy toes and muscular body. He is fully awake to sensory experience, the olfactory imagery conjuring his grim surroundings and his dream life similarly clear-sighted. He knows as well what is expected of him: terror, denial, rage, violence. What he does instead is very simple: he claims his authenticity, he decides
to be himself in his own time. In the world according to Garp, after all, all pigs are terminal cases.
I debated a bit over whether this publication was the best use of my time, and then I remembered why I started it in the first place: to recapture the love of poetry, to find in it both meaning and connection, to tell the truth about my life. To be myself in my own time. So while I am writing to you from a hospital bed this time, nothing else has really changed. I've hope you’ll stick around.
Poetry belongs to its public, so A Momentary Stay will always be free. If you’d like to support this project, you can send a one-time tip or a recurring donation on Ko-fi.
Alternatively! There’s nothing I like more than hearing that a poem you read here did something for you, or that you forwarded it to a friend or read it out loud to someone you love: I can’t trade that for coffee, but it also keeps me going.
What a gift, that you would share this vulnerable moment so beautifully. This will stay with me a long time. ❤️❤️