to be tolerable) and walked, unobserved,
past the ancient gates
of one of their Sacred Places,
the echoing courts quite empty today–
'today is for Sacred
Acts,'
they would say, cutting down the next captive–
and saw there a thing
worth the risk of this message.
It
must have been used a hundred times, yet
ready to serve all over
again, waiting in that abandoned shrine
for its one moment.
I looked at it a long time.
A proper account and you should conceive
what these people are, beyond
all their talk of 'Royal Tutor and Scribe'–
as if my duties
and my performance of them
somehow made what is happening right now
in the arena less real
or even less repellent. But there is more–
if
I make you see
the necessary
beauty
of the ... beast, as well as its brute nature,
you will realize, perhaps,
why I remain here despite the dreadful
danger to us both-
not for gain alone, but grateful
to some long-lost savagery my life had lacked.
Try to see, to imagine,
then, a Pig longer than a man, a woven
hull of bulrushes
plastered over in long stripes,
grey, flesh-pink, ochre. Cowrie-shells for eyes,
tusks of ivory curving
back to the tufted ears which, like the tail,
are worked from inside,
their 'practitioner' concealed
