Meatworks by Robert Frost Help.

[AshleeM]

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Does anyone have a copy of Meatworks by Robert Gray or does anyone know where i can get a copy please.

[Kat92]

Seeing as I can't find a copy on the internet anywhere. I'll just type it up quickly. PS> It is Robert Gray not Frost.

The Meatworks

Most of them worked around the slaughtering
out the back,where concrete gutters
crawled off
heavily, and the hot fertilizer- thick,
sticky stench of blood
sent flies mad,
but I settled for one of the lowest-paid jobs, making mince
right the furthest ends from those bellowing,
sloppy yards. Outside the pigs' fear
made them mount one another
at the last minute. I stood all day by a shaking metal box
that had a chute in, and a spout,
snatching steaks from a bin that just kept refilling
pushing them through
arm-thick corkscrews, grinding around inside it, meat or not----

chomping,bloody mouth-----
using a greasy stick
shaped into a penis.
When I grabbed it the first time
it slipped, slippery as soap, out of my hand,
in the machine
that gnawed it hysterically a few moments
louder and louder, then shuddering, stopped;
fused every light in the shop.
Too soon to sack me----
it was the first thing I'd done.
For a while, I had to lug gutted pigs
white as Swedes
and with straight stick tails
to the ice rooms, hang them by the hooves
on hooks---their dripping
solidified like candle-wax---or pack a long intestine
with sausage meat.
We got meat to take home----
bags of blood;
red plastic with the fat showing through.
We'd wash, then
out on the blue metal
towards town; but after sticking your hands all day
in snail-sheened flesh,
you found, around the nails, there was still blood.
I didn't usually take the meat.
I'd walk home on
the shiny, white-bruising beach, in mauve light,
past the town.
The beach and those startling, storm-cloud mountains,
high
beyond the furthest fibro houses, I'd come
to be with. (The only work
was at this Works.)---My wife
carried her sandals, in the sand and beach and grass,
to meet me. I'd scoop up shell-grit
and scrub my hands,
treading about
through the icy ledges of the surf
as she came along. We said that working with meat was like

burning-off the live bush
and fertilizing with rotteness,
for this frail green money.
There was a flaw to the analogy
you felt, but one
I didn't look at, then----
The way those pigs stuck there, clinging onto each other.

Robert Gray

[AshleeM]

thank you so much! and thanks for the p.s my mistake, wrong poet. thanks heaps!

[Kat92]

Your welcome! No probs.