Even Cowboys Carry Cell Phones

The Cattle

40 L e o n o r e W i l s o n The Cattle “And what about all the rest of the animality that’s embedded so deeply in our lives? What about the cattle that live so close to humans? What about the herds of cows returning at dusk from their pastures, lifting their tails and shitting in the middle of the village? What about the cattle smell, which reminds us of where we really come from? When that disappears, when it vanishes from our everyday existence, there’ll be nothing left that is capable of assuaging our loneliness.”—Andrzej Stasiuk, FADO1 To live among these bulwarks of silence with their fat-tongued Watery chorus, their constant piss and shit and aimless butting and shoving Is to know what buoys the long January tedium, what caulks the fog from seeping Into the mind’s bowl of glutted doubt where questions climb like toying branches Asking what use is living after one’s children have departed, after one’s occupation Has folded like the wings of a bat—dumb varmint blindly circling The living room as if it could find any modicum of bliss. Without the pasture’s beasts I, a mother/wife would seep into a spell of a much crueler brooding, For they have always kept me company, although at times I shouted, brandishing a willow stick, driving them from the field Where they had lingered like big-eyed relatives at the picture window As the children lay napping, swaddled in their cradles; my herding necessary In my lactating days when my hair remained unbraided, my bathrobe stained With burped-up spittle, my brain rattled by the repetitive cries That pinned me, a mad Prometheus, twisting in her own barbed-wire. Then every outside noise bugled in my head, Then every second a child slept was godly-quiet alchemy. 41 Then one day in glistening spring When the twins and the baby were three and two respectively, I walked out further, took the rutted half-mile trail to the neighbor’s glade. I shaped my irregular feet to the muddied-bovine prints as if to slow my pace, To acquire fortitude and patience. Nearing the meadow’s weathered gate I saw the fresh-wet body of a bull calf shivering in streaks of blood, Eyes clouded and dimmed in mucous; legs curled like maidenhairs beneath it. And I crouched down, shuttled my palm beneath the rakish fur, To feel its heart; oh I stayed there probably longer than I should, Believing if abandoned it would surely die; I stroked its gut, Rubbed its muzzle, but soon duty called and I hurried back To my dozing trinity, only to meet the foreman on his pony, Who when questioned told me how cows will often wander Upon giving birth, that they need about an hour after labor To harness their own strength, to nourish their own hunger; How this balm became my creed, my sleep— That I was more like them than I believed, my browsing sister-kin; Our flow-lines understood, a stalwart pushing through the hay. 1 Andrzej Stasiuk, FADO (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009), 67. ...