Butchers

Butchers 

C. K. Williams

Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly（野蛮的） things, 

 from our mountains, our tundra（苔原）—that way we had all the meat we might need. 

Thus the butcher can display under our eyes his scrubbed（精制的） hands on the block, 

 and never refer to the rooms hidden behind where dissections（解剖） are effected, 

where flesh is reduced to its shivering atoms and remade for our delectation 

 as cubes, cylinders, barely material puddles of admixtured horror and blood. 

Rembrandt knew of all this—isn't his flayed beef carcass really a caveman? 

 It's Christ also, of course, but much more a troglodyte（类人猿） such as we no longer are. 

Vanished those species—begone!—those tribes, those peoples, those nations—

 Myrmidon, Ottoman, Olmec, Huron, and Kush: gone, gone, and goodbye.

But back to the chamber of torture, to Rembrandt, who was telling us surely 

 that hoisted（升起，举起） with such cables and hung from such hooks we too would reveal 

within us intricate layerings of color and pain: alive the brush is with pain, 

 aglow with the cruelties of crimson（深红色）, the cooled, oblivious ivory of our innards. 

Fling out the hooves of your hands! Open your breast, pluck out like an Aztec 

 your heart howling its Cro-Magnon cries that compel to battles of riddance! 

Our own planet at last, where purged of wilderness, homesickness, prowling, 

 we're no longer compelled to devour our enemies' brains, thanks to our butcher, 

who inhabits this palace, this senate, this sentried barbed-wire enclosure 

 where dare enter none but subservient（屈从的，奉承的） breeze; bent, broken blossom; dry rain.