A Preview A Review A Knot

It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets.
It was a swift and menacing time.
One of the local dogs was having a phantom pregnancy.
Things were leaving one place and showing up in another.
It was springtime when I arrived, an east wind blowing,
an uncanny wind as it turned out.
 
Certain things began to arise and even if I had only
recently arrived and had no livestock-caretaking
responsibilities, had only been in to look,
safely on one side of the electric fence, I knew they
were right to hold me responsible.
 
I was the youngest of many whom I tended from
my earliest infancy, before indeed,
I had power of speech, these,
my many siblings, were put in my charge.
 
I attended to their every desire, smoothed
away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience,
with the highest degree of devotion,
so that over time their desires became mine,
so that I came to anticipate wants not yet articulated,
perhaps not even yet imagined.
 
Since childhood, I continued to spend the long years
cultivating solitude, pursuing silence to its ever-receding
horizon, a pursuit that demanded a self-forgetfulness on my part
that would enable me to bring to bear the most painstaking
consideration to the other, to treat the other
as the worthiest object of contemplation.
 
In this process, I would become reduced, diminished.
Ultimately, I would become clarified, even
cease to exist. I would be good. I would be all
that had ever been asked of me.

Author's Note: "A Preview A Review A Knot" is a found poem with phrases from the first chapter of the novel Study for Obedience. I have left some words and phrases out but have added nothing except a few innocuous words such as and and but. Reading Study for Obedience made me feel tipsy - lost in time and space, being led about by a mysterious unreliable guide who I was incapable of abandoning. The poem, I hope, will give the reader some sense of that experience.