The River Pigs

In summer, after the oak and pine

Have been floated down the rivers

And into the hot ponds and the maws

Of the great mill,

The river pigs come to town,

Rolling along the wooden sidewalks

With unsteady steps -

Sailors without a ship.

All spring they have forced the logs

Cross-wise and length-wise

Down the cold rivers,

Jumping from log to log

With the grace of Grecian dancers

In their two-hundred pound bodies;

Balancing themselves with pike-poles,

Attacking, turning, spinning,

Whirling into their log dance,

Now on the sidewalks of the town,

Under the glare and heat of the day,

Their feet remember the dance

But their eyes forget the cues

And their ears the crescendo

Of log clonking log

In the rush of the water.

Up the narrow stairs,

Behind the camouflage of respectability,

They find, when the dark comes,

The women waiting;

Dark women sinuous as pine branches,

With laughter in their voices

Like the river in the sunlight,

And the haunting lonely undertones

Of slow currents in dark pools,

All the summer

The river pigs stay in the town,

Laughing, loving, forgetting.

But when the days of white frost come,

The town no longer hears

The clomp, clomp of steel-studded boot soles

On the sidewalks and up the narrow stairs.

The river pigs are gone,

Who have with summer eyes attacked the town,

And will, all winter long, remember it.