David Gewanter

        the smirking pig trotting toward its noose,
did you first think of grafting a new life

to your life? Because the body is hostile
      (you once explained) it must be tricked

        into welcoming the foreign substance
that can save it, the trickle of pig

you now slip inside a man's skull. Call it
      immuno-suppression. Or call it

        a violation of self, when the spores
leech through the soft Parkinsonian

ganglia, so the spastic man
      tied twenty years to a chair by

         his frantic wife, can now smack
a nine-iron and snort Watch her go.

To graft new life is to cut one away,
      to grow from withering-

        Whatever it is you put in a brain
has first come from yours:

What remains there today
      when dog will mew, and cat

        will have his day, when a man
quivering after years of

deliberation rises from his chair at last,
      closes with steady hand the door

        his wife holds
and walks away from his house?

David Gewanter co-editor of The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell, is the author of two books of poems, In the Belly, and Sleep of Reason (both from the University of Chicago Press). He's been a fellow at Bread Loaf, and was a Witter Bynner fellow at the US Library of Congress in 1999. His book of poems won the John C. Zacharis award from Ploughshares magazine. Most recently, he has received the Whiting Foundation's Writers Award.

In Posse: Potentially, might be ...