Scott Hightower
with postcard mail art by Bryant Webster Schultz
Era of Stupidity & Uncertainty
… not a man can report
Evil of this place.
—William Butler Yeats, “The Dolls"
Beware the lettuce you eat,
the matrix of the plane you fly in,
and the sciencelessness of orange pig
whom without pants
yanks around the farm
with his careless misapplications
of kookie theories
and his misunderstanding of international trade
and tariffs, his overall misconstruing
of economics and justice,
his malicious racism and cruelty.
In spite of their wings, he likes airplanes;
is not into pencils (has no pants pockets),
no insight into humanity,
and no insight into the art
or nature of dolls.
Orange Pig & the Swan
Once, on a junket, Orange Pig visited
Hohenschwangua and Neuschwanstein Castles.
From a window in one of the surprisingly small
rooms of Hohenschwangua Castle, he looked out
on a distant glittering mountain lake.
He did not see any swans,
but he knew they glided there.
Today, a Leda-graceful swan
has captured his eye. In his current
phantasy, he lowers his lips
and hoods her bill. And though
she thrashes and quarrels, in the end,
she ecstatically argues, then worships
his pronounced godly “manhood.”
Orange Pig & the Vulture
One afternoon, Orange Pig observed
a turkey vulture gracefully tearing
and eating carrion in an adjoining pasture. He,
being an ever-lonely sort, thought she––
though being one of those awful creatures
with wings––might find him to be inexorably
interesting. Other than their nasty diet
of carrion and having wings, Orange Pig
knew nothing about vultures. None-the-less
he sent the lovely creature an invitation
to tea. She was not as he had expected.
Lacking a syrinx––the vocal organ
of birds––she only vocalized by grunts.
He grunted; she grunted. He was fascinated
by her short hooked ivory beak; the two rows
of eyelashes on each of her lower eyelids. She was
surprisingly gregarious. She spread her wings
in the sunlight: drying them, warming her body,
baking off any bacteria. She unapologetically
evacuated on her feet. He ascertained
from her grunts that she was looking forward,
in a few days, to laying an egg or two;
but that––oddly to him––she showed
no concerns to constructing any sort of nest.
She made it clear that her partner with the brood
would assist her with the incubation
of whatever eggs were to come.
Orange Pig could never find a clear
opportunistic moment to pounce.
She seemed incorruptible in her self-possession;
her self-identification of providing a worthy
purifying service, a sincere professional reaper…
a systemic gleaner. She never hissed at him.
He found her to be lovely, a beauty, whole;
even noble. At that point, she regurgitated,
wiped the corners of her mouth,
and their tea was finished.
Unbeknownst to him, she departed
thinking: “This sad, insufferable,
foolish little beast knows
nothing about husbanding
anything in this world!”
Yeats Is Turning Over in his Grave
The Pretender of Orange is just
declaration, “After all, I am the Duke
of Orange… and you are not.”
His distortion is a mirror
reflecting a mirror in a mirror,
all quarrel and garble; no pedigree,
no poetics, no argument. His inflation
moves feebly forward, never
turns back on itself, just turns out
to be like Cleopatra’s surrender at sea,
to be like one of Walter Pater’s roads
behind La Gioconda, to be like one
of Marie Ponsot’s clouds, an approach to reverse,
to free verse to the irrationality of poetry.