The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: animals

  • Cae’r Blaidd, or Field of the Wolf

    Cae’r Blaidd, or Field of the Wolf

      The last wolf died in this place but the hour of the wolf remains and the wolves call for us, call for you calling haunting us with their calling calling for us over and over again It is the time when we cross over as some people say of the passing away in the…

  • Charmed

    Charmed

      She calls him from a thousand miles distance – sends forth an invisible cord from her edge of cliff to his edge of existence. She calls him in autumn storms, in summer stillness, grooves a new migration route, moons him towards her for tide after tide. Some claim, with disdain, that she practised with…

  • Wolf

    Wolf

      Snow covered the town, and murmurs. Unease, downcast eyes, a rumour you were back in the holding where the song thrush is mute, where a path spills like yarn to the clearing. The fetid black leaf and the bracken. The crackle underfoot. The weird cabin. It gaped from the white like a lunatic’s face….

  • Hamrammr

    Hamrammr

      Úlfhéðnar in my wolf-skin, I am smuggled beneath this fearsome hide. Sneaksome, bristlepad varúlfur, I must stay concealed, keep my woman-ness below the scenting of the men. They would smell my sex and think me weak, think me there for the mating, the taking, the ruling, the putting me in my place. Bottom of…

  • Phenomenology of the Feral

    Phenomenology of the Feral

      After the Meat Tree   I Man’s best friend, woman’s best friend are has a jay, and mere has an add. I flower mere and he follows me that was made of wood and flowers and see, it is pronounced mer as the french for sea not mere lie down you are drunk. Remember…

  • The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner

    The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner

      – adapted from SJ Fowler If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be? Black banana, fruit flies, les ananas ne parlent pas, (a little song of two children learning french on Canadian TV). In middle school, the chair in the crypt. The stack of cryptic poems high enough to use as a…

  • Gilfaethwy

    Gilfaethwy

      The pirate is part magician and part thief. With all the gauze and white tape, I know the left side of his face better than the right side. Pirates, like werewolves, live tied to the moon. The dark break in the white plaster is the negative of the full moon rising. here Gilfaethwy gills…

  • from Parchment, Scalpel, Rock: Howling

    from Parchment, Scalpel, Rock: Howling

      a wolf is a tunnel into the earth …… full of teeth (and what should I call a sideways stalag mmm-/t-ite?) not just the wind howling through the steppes’ hollow torso? a zero-sum game? an eremophage without organs? the little bumps ‘become’ horns……the horns become penises the penises teeth …… the teeth : skeletons…

  • The Time of the White Wolf

    The Time of the White Wolf

    It snowed for thirty years and no-one knew when the snow would end. The old people could remember the times before the snow, But none of the young ones had ever seen the sun rise or set or blaze at midday. None of them had traced the patterns made by the stars in the night…

  • Running with the Wolves

    Running with the Wolves

    When I was a kid I wanted to be a wolf. I think it started when I read Jack London: White Fang and Call of the Wild set loose all kinds of fantasies and imaginings in my young mind that developed into a full-blown desire to swap my human skin for a wolfish replacement. Every…

  • Matriarchs, Monsters and Feral Children

    Matriarchs, Monsters and Feral Children

    Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein’s monster. The Capitoline Wolf. Mary Shelley. Four names, four figures forming a strange kind of family, if we can call it that. Perhaps better to say, ‘a pack’. Each is linked to other in a lineage of imagination, creation, or birth. There is a shared marginality. Each was believed somehow to have…