the baby cow

( like always: its not anywhere near finished yet, so improvement suggestions are more than appreciated.
but--i have some semblance of a poem! and i am happy to be fussing with it, even though-- all things considered.
there is certainly grace for the moment. more to come. but here---edit! )


The Baby Cow
for Jack, who taught me how to fish

Coming home from the war, you rode a train from New
York to Tennessee to Alabama, which was home. You stopped
in Jackson because you couldn’t wait any longer for some fried chicken,
which they didn’t have in France. It wasn’t as good as your mothers.
My great-grandmother makes the most southern fried chicken
anyone has ever put in their mouth. Her biscuits could have been fed
to the confederate army before battle, so the boys would die thinking of home.
I certainly do not have this skill.
This is probably because I do not understand chickens.
I do not understand which eggs are shipped to warehouses in Milwaukee,
and then to the corner grocery in Odessa, established 1811,
and which are incubated, en masse, warm and safe.
Eventually, a chick breaks through the translucent shell,
and undertakes its chickenly duties, until the end of its life. And I do not understand
how chickens manage to run around after their heads are cut off.
I certainly do not have that skill, either.

The same cigar has been in your mouth since the war,
and since then you have fancied yourself an artist. We take our notebooks
and find a spot by the riverbank and sketch any dandelion or caterpillar
that comes across our path. We are not only artists, but scientists:
later, we take our drawings to the library and find the scientific names,
Magnoliopsida Asteraceae, and add any necessary details to the drawings
that we missed before. We are precise, and precisely none of this has ever happened.

What happened was this: we woke earlier than the fish and spent an hour digging
for the best worms (I used my thumb and forefinger as a pair of forceps).
Finally, at the pond, we got ourselves situated in a good spot, near the reeds,
and, despite the rope tied around my baby-girl waist, I promptly fell in.
both annoyed and amused, you fished me out and walked me home. You told me
a story about a man you knew in France, who also got himself into a river
and couldn’t swim. That man bought a horse for five dollars from a nearby farm
The stories I like best are about farms. Your great-grandmother
used eight gallons of syrup a day to feed all her children and the farmhands;
your great-aunt’s best friend got stuck on the barn roof for half the night
before anyone could talk her into coming down. And your father
was the last keeper of the Baby Cow. The Baby Cow’s stall was the second
from the end on the right, and had been since 1842, in a controversial move
by whichever distant relative was the Baby-Cow-Keeper at that time.
The cow was not fed raw silage or rough grain, nor was it allowed
to eat fresh grass from the field. Everyone in the town contributed
hay and short for feed, and the Baby Cow contributed warm,sweet milk
for every hungry baby. And every person in the town, from 1788-1962, was fed
from the Baby Cow, or the Baby Cow’s mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
great-great-grandmother, and so on, together and again, amen.

“The end of an era,” people said when the Baby Cow, and FDR,
passed on. They lit a candle, said their prayers. It is a night for prayers:
both unanswered and unprayed. I want my unborn children to learn
all the things I have missed: the way to climb to the tallest trees and how to skip
rocks all the way across the pond (mine stop after two skips).
And how to whittle. I’ve always wanted to know how to whittle.
I will pray for these things as I sit by the riverbank.
Posted 5/18/2007 12:19 AM