Wordhoard

Back into the Anglo-Saxon poems. Middle of the fourth century until the middle of the eleventh, precisely when all them Christian missionaries were bringing their messages. The earliest pieces are raw, vicious, but they mellow, over time. This is why Pound cut 25% of The Seafarer, and it was that translation (1912), brilliant and flawed, that first attracted me to these poems. I feel like I'm watching culture devolve. Comic books and buffoons. Since there's no restriction, David Duke might as well be Secretary of the Interior. I don't subscribe to anything, I get The New Yorker as a gift, I read Harper's and Scientific American at the library, where someone else pays for the heating and cooling. I always love going into the library, it smells so good and the temp is going to be about 70 degrees. Hog slaughtering time. I can tell, because when I get home from a quick trip to town (last chance before the girls get here tomorrow), and quick, to beat the rain and snow, there's a five gallon bucket with two pig's heads, a kidney, and an entire liver (huge). I slice the liver and freeze it, toward future pates. Two heads is one too many, so I call a friend to come and get the larger, then skin the smaller one and hang in the woodshed. I'll cure the jowls and make souse from the rest of it, but it won't suffer from hanging a couple of days. There's quite a bit of meat on a pig's head. I'm tempted to make scrapple, which I dearly love. That would involve removing quite a bit of fat, which I could render down. The water/mixture used for boiling down the head results in a great liquid for a pot of beans. The head from a 200 pound hog is too much for one person living alone, properly boiled and presented it would be a meal for a dozen people, with sweet potatoes and cornbread. I'd meant to spend the afternoon doing a bit of house-cleaning, but I can do that with the girls, especially if it snows. Fuck a bunch of plans. Cory, at the pub, would trade lunch futures against some scrapple, and he's much taken with my country pates. A few free beers in my future. Notice the way stress falls on the alliteration. The way it echoes. I was so involved with that rapid switch, from rapine and havoc, to something much more domesticated, that I'd failed to notice the day had slipped away. I'd be hard-pressed to make this up. Following tradition. I cook some neck bones with rice and kimchee. I saved out a slice of liver, for breakfast, by the time I go to bed I'm exhausted and I have a mess, mostly contained on recycled newspaper, that I need to bury in the compost pile before the girls get here. I'd rather pile the offal off the side of the road, down in the forest, so the crows could work through it, but it starts raining hard, and all I can think about is getting some sleep. My hands are cramped, from using a skinning knife, and I have to heat a kettle of water, to wash off the blood. I'm so tired, after midnight, that I double-check my every move, get a small dram of whiskey, roll a smoke, sit back, and think about free will. I don't know what to think. I live a fairly natural life, organic, shade-grown, and there's a pig's head hanging in my woodshed.