The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Category: Wolf Crossing

  • 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…

  • Shortening the Candle’s Wick I

    Shortening the Candle’s Wick I

      Realisation I lie in the rich grass a blissful ringing in my head. Distant voices bring me food the way ants brought gold to a king in olden times. There are two horseflies. There may even be a snake around here somewhere. In any case there is an old mill-pond and downstream are some…

  • Shortening the Candle’s Wick II

    Shortening the Candle’s Wick II

    Over the wet alders the wind gallops along the road raging, swinging a club. Then tired out in the high pines’ lap like a child after crying still sobs. Wet, the colour of tree trunks, lifting up her skirt’s hem, the old woman quietly goes. Gathered from roadside bilberry shrubs in her billy can the…

  • Coyote Journal

    Coyote Journal

    I was raised by a nanny for most of my life. She was an illegal immigrant from Guatemala that made it to Los Angeles, and then into my family home. She was kind and loving, and knew how to get me to be quiet when it was time for me to sleep. She would say…

  • Coyote

    Coyote

    All aboard, climb inside! Back of the van! Get back, Loretta! Only 1500 miles to the promised land! Farm jobs, construction, cleaning, meatpacking, don’t bleed when you’re cut or you go right back! Need papers? Housing? A lawyer? A clue? My cousin, he’ll hook you up. Fenrir. We grew up together. Wolf, coyote, closer than…

  • 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…

  • The girl and the half wolf sound

    The girl and the half wolf sound

      Release the pack into their whorling wolfscream. A lightning-cut electrified cable of a scream, sparking to a panicked dance. Let its coiled metal whips snap out and back in thwarted reach. I am just a jogger in a forest with racing huskies hoarse behind me. I lived to tell this tale and all the…

  • Little Death Waltz

    Little Death Waltz

      In the heart of hearths there is her, she wolf . . . . . . . .who, linking arms with your first-born, . . . . . . . .who, shedding dresses, crossing breeds with . . . . . . . .leading him on to . . . . . . ….

  • 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…