Dear Anger,

get me past the girls’ gate
beyond all that God-sap,
honey of sex flowing, heavy in their veins.

                            ˜
I’m moving beyond all I adored.
Come with Brutal Awareness.
Her value until now
I never understood.

The Cerebellum Singing Its Cosmic Scales

I am still a sucker for the sky.
For evening’s azure negligée.
The pale-green canopy of spring—
bullet-ridden or lacy—
take your pick—
through which the dead
come and go at whim.
Feel them watch, brush past?
No amount of liquid tongue
can cling or clasp.
Yet these lines stack themselves
one by one, from the coccyx
of darkest matter to the spinal
cord of a thought.

For Vermeer and His “Sleeping Girl”

The room is drowsy with darkness.
Things are in disarray
but the girl sleeps on, sitting up:

Her cheeks flushed and soft
as the fruit in the bowl before her.

Her widow’s peak cutting a heart
in her brow.

Her sturdy body beginning
to contain us the way the jug
in front of her has contained wine.

And the door to this room
always part way open.

So we go on wanting
what cannot be had:

To behold what her closed eyes see
without shuddering her awake.

The New Room

When I see the nervelike
beginnings of ginkgoes,
something unknown in me sets off
up a tributary, entertains
leaving the ones I love.

I dream time after time of a new room
on the apartment, an undiscovered wing
I might grow into, huge
and full of light, with a view of trees
and sky. It saddens me to awaken.

It is death that grows, life that falls apart.
I live in a dark four and a half room walk-up.
My sister was a half-sister.
I hardly feel a pang now when I think of her.

My secret is the trees.
They let me go on when it was she
whose bare feet I had climbed upon,
she who smelled of autumn
and had autumn’s apricot hair.

I have stood at her grave
a few long minutes,
felt great agitation in the air.
Though the elms above me remained peaceful
and the Ompompanoosac still pleased me
with its vowel-full name,
neither could soothe
the Susan in stone.

The Tightrope Walker Whose Wire Is Herself

In Rodin’s sculpture of Iris
she is compacted into the smallest
space imaginable then opened from the center
like a sectioned fruit,
legs bent and parted, one knee northeast,
one knee west,
the pressed-open flower of her sex
reversing the tucked-in pelvis at prayer.

My iris has some of the hues of bruises.
Its petals dwell in the dangerous
bands of the spectrum I love,
where brightness fails and red orange
yellow green step down into blue indigo violet.

auGUST AUgust

Nothing shone.
Even the trees limped
under such foliage.

And the implements
—rusty and large—
in the machine shops

whizzing past had no luster.
Words missing letters
offended the eye,

causing the proofreader’s
brain to struggle—
what took so long

in forming
why take it
apart?

Then the solitary
sunflower
showed its face

amid the densation
of green

—Ah, sunflower,
 you were my . . .  weary,
 alack           clack  clack clack
ek-
ko

of the woman on the train’s wondering
how to remember
anymore
what you are.

Cambium Girl

Girl, who earlier
dreamed of ringlets
fat, brown slinkies down her back
and of the sophistication of wearing
slingback shoes,

Now has become this slim fish of a person
testing herself out
still too easily swallowed
by the deeps
or a field of tall reeds.

Her father called her
Long Drink of Water,
this frail changeling
to be returned to
for however many years
there are to come.

She was modeled on the tree,
whose writings are also internal:
tracings of
a single open vowel
O o
held, drawn,
echoed within itself

to mark time and protect
the living part of the tree:
cambium,

Where cells divide
and exchange themselves
for something tougher,
more useful:
xylem or phloem—
though it is here:
place of utmost passage

without which neither
she nor the tree
       could survive.

Hummingbird Haiku

Ruby throat, come near.
Feed. Be punctilious—
Stitch-stitching—sans thread.

                   Allow
that they might navigate the headwaters
of Draco’s crocodile tears,
these good night sailors, reckoning
                                  by their star compass.

                       Watch, how
Indigo Buntings—each its own
feather-covered patch of daylight
sky—turned loose
under the planetarium’s false
night, pass the test of the constellations.
How they find in those colander stars
their seasonal routes
north and south.

         And believe this, too:
That the geese who haunt
the North Sea’s estuaries
each winter, hatch there,
overnight, full-grown, from the fat,
blue-lipped barnacles that hug
the shore’s wood-drift.

Then you can see, exactly, how
a pair of Purple Finches have come
this morning to claim their home in my backyard.

Offspring of a winter’s wrong-headed longing.

The female, shadow-streaked,
a secret.  The male,
all blood knot, all idiot song.

Just when I’m most certain,
an opposite intrudes.
Walk with me. Here
over the strand tracks
confirm a presence
until tidal sweep
inundates impressions
or scurries of sand abrade—
ghosting our glyphs.

A theorem, a belief:
the in-between matters.
Gapped by menace—cliff-fall,
sea-surge—to devoutly fix
an iridescent cloud,
its droplets half-formed, prismed,
or listen among the dunes
where wind-hum resists
bracketings of silence.

This has consequence:
creation confined
to a span, its truth
dispersed at each terminus.
Even now our path perturbs
the conversation—
among the flats and scrub
marsh clover, pillowy, pink,
mocking the dead.

Give me props of art, a god
to mediate this. Or the prop
of your arm—don’t leave—
now that a fog rolls in,
so thick it enshrouds
with sheets of viscous air
but lit, a dull pearl, from what
must be a solar lake
somewhere—setting, yet burning.
 

A Cubist Confronts Monday

Pour the thin liquors I call alcools,
morning throat-raw, dark blood tinges
a frozen dawn, annihilating our games.
Hold high a cracked rim to first spill of blue
when daylight, veil on veil, occults
celestial mirth, accelerates a dance
to tie our ties—hair back in place,
a warm shaved face answering a fragrance,
last night’s perfume, the stepping into traffic…

A bus transports my bones, fissured, edged
in jagged glass. Passengers view
solids, voids, intersecting cuts
of patchwork man pulled toward a temple
whose angles fit the shape of what provides.
Planes of my face, groin, buttocks
slip into a passing slot—a tower’s
revolving door—it shows my every side
to mammon’s guards. When boss bull bellows,

I’m on the horn, severed from ear
attending to a jargon, a journal
entry in corporate lives. What use words
when gins of perfect thirst mill years to urgencies?
Back on the street. I hurry past bottles,
heaps of the broken holding on boxboard brown
lyric of unscanned suffering that piques
disregard (that quick averted glance)
as if a prose, spiritless, clouded…

Night again. This stave like unheard cant,
quaint as milkmen clinking over cobblestone,
music no one pays to hear. Étude
all surface and slant, faking the underside
in tests to alloy scrap with solace—
a divertissement with which to pass the time?
I lift a chipped old tumbler, hoping to taste
liquid alive. Dust pours out,
nothing to slake thirst for limpid fire

Sleeping beside you
is like sharing the sheets with a fish
reeled up on the boat deck
the hook rooted firm
in your angry, sweet mouth
you twist and twist circles, spirals,
your tail flaps and beats,
slap, slap, slapping
on the wooden planks
I dodge your sharp scaly sides
and wonder are you remembering a time
when salt was your world
and you didn’t want change,
but gasped
some strange new element.
I reach my calf around you,
an arm slid in your fin
and wait
while you adjust
to this air, this life
of yours with me.

On the Road North

Winding up the mountain on Route 2 on my way to pick up my son at the police station at 3 a.m., held in protective custody from himself, the car moved along the unmarked road, and from the corner of my eye in a far-off field, I saw a deer—young, lithe, moving with that grace deer have—she stopped, head tilted up, looked my way, I thought maybe our eyes had met, moving the way each of us do, now, tonight without question or thought, in the silence that holds the roar of crickets and the fires of falling stars, where blades of grass wet with night chill the feet, and earth presses back and pushes us through the dark, dark night.

The Kitchen Table

This pull, these hands,
they move as swiftly as her thumb and forefinger
through a rosary.
I sit on a stool
between my mother’s legs
at the long oak table
that belonged to my grandmother.
Its wood hums turnips and colcannon.
I take a rubber grape from the bowl
and squeeze its stemless end
onto my tongue
bobbing it in and out of my mouth
and scratch my fingernail across
the table until it fills with a waxy residue.

The hairbrush scrapes the side of my face
the comb exacts a part in the middle of my head
half and half I am
as she begins the twisting of braids through her fingers
a tight tug with each rope of hair
a quick yank on each side of me, then
she puts two fingers in her mouth
and mats the downy crown
on my forehead.

Out of This Night

The blue light of winter
pushes through the curtains
all around the window’s ledge
it seeps in slowly and turns
to morning’s white.

You sleep upstairs
pull the covers over your head
and in this artificial dark
your room becomes a safe place
the bed, safer still.

I hear footsteps across the attic floor—
bare toes moving tentatively over splintered boards,
arms pulled tight across your body from the cold—
feet move with each creak of loose board
trying to feel your way down the staircase.

The water begins to run.
And run and run and run.

I wish I could bathe you in that water
baptize you pure
raise your body
out of the blue night
to the morning’s light
and the gushing stars
would wash over you,
and the roar that lies on the other side of silence.

When I was growing up, hurricanes meant nothing more than mystery, parties, and excitement. But that changed in September 1999 when Hurricane Floyd began threatening my barrier island real estate in Florida.

It was a Monday night when Jacksonville’s mayor ordered the beaches evacuated the following day.  The bridges would be closed and no one allowed to return without a pass.  By this time, my husband had already been on the phone for hours trying to find a motel room and had secured one at the Manor Inn, 240 miles away in Perry, GA.

He’d long since given up asking if they accepted pets.  There wasn’t a motel this side of the Mississippi that accepted pets.  Why should we be the ones to burst their bubble!

Sleep eluded me as I tried to calculate the really important things I could pack in our two- door sedan.  My husband, our two cockatiels, Cappie, our cairn terrier, and Rhapsody, our sheltie, were givens.  The rest: paper, pictures and panic.

There weren’t enough roads out of the beach to contain all the traffic—reasonably anyway.  It took us two and a half hours to leave the city limits of Jacksonville and seven hours more to reach the motel.  The cairn, draped across my lap for all those hours clearly thought, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

People who hadn’t called ahead for rooms stood in the lobby of the Manor Inn and cried.  One very pregnant woman threatened to have her baby on the floor by the registration desk.  The nearest vacancies were now in Alabama.

As we made our way to our room, I understood fully the phrase, “Everybody and his dog.” Dogs arrived that had never seen the inside of a car, much less a motel room. There were cats, birds, an iguana, and a very impressive python.  Some people even brought their children.

When we’d unpacked and dog-proofed the room (moving everything above the high water mark that the dogs might chew or pee on), I got the first hint of things to come.  There was a loud splash and colorful exclamations from my husband.  He’d dropped the new travel alarm in the toilet.  But any port in a storm.  We put it on the bedside table and tried to forget where it’d been a few minutes before.

Did I mention that Rhapsody was in heat?  That she’s a BIG sheltie?  Fastening her leash securely, I prepared to take her outside where she could spread the good word of her “condition.”

I opened the door just as a maid approached carrying a high stack of towels.  Rhapsody lunged at this apparition, and towels sailed like cresting waves as the maid ran in the other direction.  For goodness sake.  It wasn’t like she was a python.

We continued on our way, and when we reached the grass, I was relieved to see a fence between us and the male dog walking down the road.  Have you ever seen a Weimaraner climb a chain link fence?  That gave me some idea of just how desirable our Rhapsody had become.

A few hours later, when my husband turned off the weather channel, I realized the two large dogs I’d seen earlier were camping out on the balcony above our room.  I can attest to the acuity of their hearing, vision and sense of smell.  Nothing moved that they didn’t know about.  They barked, then our dogs barked.  Our dogs barked and the dogs next door barked.  At times the noise threatened to drown out the sound of the cricket who had set up housekeeping in our air vent.  The night passed fitfully until 5 a.m. when, to our horror, the soggy alarm went off.

As the hours dragged by, we no longer felt safe in our room.  We felt trapped, unable to get news of conditions at Jacksonville’s beaches.  By Wednesday evening, we’d wrangled a number for the emergency line in Duval County.

“Stay put,” we were told. “There’s a shortage of gas, and the bridges to the beaches won’t open until late evening.”

Thursday morning the soggy alarm finally succumbed, but I was awake by 5 a.m. anyway.  I staggered to the lobby and waited drop by drop for a cup of coffee to brew.  I took one grateful sip and made my way back to our room.  Barely inside the door, I heard my husband yell to a dog “Give me that sock!”  Numbly I watched a brown sock, tossed in the air, glide and dip, not unlike Forrest Gump’s white feather.  It came to rest in my precious cup of coffee.

Floyd proved to be a mama’s boy.  He made a mess at our beaches but nothing a little sweat equity couldn’t handle.  Though he would be nothing compared to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he still left an enduring legacy that changed our lives.  Today we drive a very large car with all the cargo space we can afford.   We even went so far as to build a second home in Georgia—not that we have anything against the Manor Inn in Perry.

A mama’s boy?  Never trust one.

It was more uncomfortable than I remembered.  Except for my rush hour memory of a guy trying to secretly hump me from behind when I was nineteen.  I definitely remember that as being uncomfortable.  I give him credit for trying to be surreptitious and gentle, but really, I think we both knew he was kidding himself about how little hump pressure it takes to let someone know they’re being humped.  It’s almost none.

I really love the subway, and in LA I missed it a lot.  I took the bus for a while in LA, and I liked the fact that everyone on it was considered to be a loser just by virtue of being on the bus.  Like for everyone else in their bullshit earth-hating Hummer cars, just SEEING the bus go by, and just SEEING people waiting for the bus, bummed them out.

It’s like those new airlines that are all business class.  It’s one thing to hate coach and want to fly business – it’s another to hate the very IDEA of coach so badly that it ruins your flight just to see anyone else getting on coach.  So I liked the bus in that way.

But it still wasn’t like the subway.  I like the jumble of everyone being on the subway.  Everyone having to see everyone else twice a day—having a little group hang out time.  We might all end up hating each other, but at least the hate is rooted in some visuals.  They don’t have to be reasonable: I hate that guy’s face.  I hate that guy’s hat.  I hate those loud kids.  I hate that woman who looks dumb.

There are real details to back up the hate, as opposed to in LA, where everyone just drives around hating people in the abstract.  People who may or may not be wearing hats.  Who may or may not be looking dumb.

And then there’s the way your soul can stretch a bit on the subway.  Just because you have the time and there’s nothing else to do.  Yeah.  Your fucking soul.

Like sometimes I’ll do the thing where I look around and try to remember that everyone on the train was once a baby.  That’s a good exercise to do every once in awhile.  To look for the ghost of someone’s baby face in their current face.

It’s like those illusion posters where you have to stare really hard to see the dinosaur or the unicorn or whatever. (I have never once found the unicorn or the dinosaur.  I fucking hated those posters.)

The other thing I’ll do is look and try to guess who’s married.  I look at someone and then I look to see if they have a ring on.  Here’s the lesson you learn from this game:  it’s a crapshoot.  Wanna get married?  Time to get thin and beautiful.  Or wait a second – hold on – maybe you better get started being fat and hideous.

It seems it’s primarily the people filling out the middle who are ringless – the average, the just fine, the just OK.  Perhaps proving what Picasso said (or was it Matisse?) about how That which is ugly can be beautiful, but that which is pretty will never be beautiful.

Actually, it doesn’t prove that at all.  I think what it proves is, I am the creepiest person on the train, always.

Michelle, the victim, was miserable. The infant perp had obviously been miserable. And the kid’s mom–some sort of accessory to the whole thing–was two layers of miserable: Dealing with a raging tot is one thing (she does that all day), but being responsible for a little wailer as she’s sitting in a little public tube in the sky, having daggers stared into her…The poor woman must have been embarrassed over 12 states.

Thus was born The Stork.

That’s just a working title – something like “The Happy Pigeon to Disney World” probably flows better, but all that comes after the point, which is this: Why not have a commercial flight specifically for families traveling with young kids?

Instead of United Flight 447 from New York to Orlando, families can catch the United Stork from New York to Orlando.

When the plane arrives at the gate, 100 little grape-juice stained noses are pushed up against the wall-glass because they’ve never seen anything like this: The whole fuselage is painted like giant stork with a soothing, developmentally-delayed grin on its beak.

A gate attendant in a Cinderella costume boards the kids like the Pied Piper. The in-flight movie is Cars II. The flight attendants can make balloon animals. Instead of pretzels you get Happy Meals. And instead of first-class, you have infant class – a quiet, curtained-off corner where you can gently rock the especially disturbable little ones.

And if your kid won’t stop screaming, so what? You’re surrounded by other parents. No one’s glaring at you. Their ears probably can’t even hear the crying kid wavelength anymore.

This plane would always be packed – especially if you’ve got it going to and from a big family destination, like Florida. You could charge an extra $20 or $30 per seat for the experience.

It also creates a nice customer-service halo around your whole company, though you’ve only tweaked the operations of one or two planes. Even if you don’t travel with child, you’re going to remember which airline is thinking of ways to make people’s flights easier.

And the earned media: Good lord, the coverage you’ll get for this on a slow news day.

So, other than the fact that The Stork’s flight attendants would probably have an above-average suicide rate, what holes can you poke in this idea? None. Because this idea is a double-stuff Oreo, and the extra stuff is money.

My mother was married and living in Manhattan in1949 and working in a nondescript time clock job for General Motors. It was pretty oppressive and my mother hated it, crying frequently over the phone to her father, a great educator in Canada, about how much she hated it and how demeaning she felt the job was.

My grandfather, Gramp, a Superintendent of Education for the Province of Ontario, being a forthright, strong principled man, who believed in an individual’s character and spirit, advised my mother to quit and find another job, which she soon did, going to work for American Book Publishers where she helped edit Dick and Jane books for children.

Before her escape from General Motors, my mother was there long enough to take an action which clearly delineated much about how she saw the world, and herself within it. At General Motors, the female employees were not allowed to go to the bathroom without raising their hand and asking the male supervisor for permission. Once permission was given, the supervisor would then give the female employee a key to the ladies room which had to be returned when the respective employee was finished with what she needed to do.

My mother kept quiet, observing, taking in the lay of the land, and then on about her third day at work, she made her move. She raised her hand and asked for permission to go to the ladies room. Then, with key in hand, instead of going to the ladies room, she slipped out of the General Motors building and across the street to Woolworth’s and had a duplicate key made. From that day on, during her short remaining tenure at General Motors, my mother simply went to the bathroom without first asking permission.

Okay, so maybe it’s not a great story of rebellion and resistance, but it does show a strength of character within my mother, and it also shows that she was more concerned with results than acclaim or commotion or credit about accomplishing something she thought was proper. In her own way, she quietly bucked the system, beat the petty tyrant without the tyrant knowing otherwise, and maintained a sense of dignity and success which she felt no need to share, and would most likely never be shared except for the fact that I have scribbled it down now.

Tiny drifts of snow piling up here and there on the hay in the loft. All the tie beams and king posts are frosted. All the rafters curve inward, forming shallow basins threatening to crack and let the snow sift in. When I finish throwing down hay from the loft, I go to the parlor and feed the cows and calves. ThenI check on Minna, who is in labor, and find the tendons soft at the base of her spine. Swollen vulva drooling. Gluey fluids hang like taffy. When the pains hit her, she does a little hoof-to-hoof dance, a two-step sort of. The stanchion rattles. She swishes her tail as if trying to swat the pain.

“Be a big girl,” I tell her. My head aches from tension and worry and lack of sleep. There is a tic in my right eyebrow driving me crazy. I rub my eyes with the heels of my hands and only succeed in making things worse. I might be getting another migraine. There is a vague numbness on the right side of my face again.

Right hand feeling oddly weak, a symptom experienced by my grandfather when he had a stroke—the numbness, weakness on one side. Two days later he was dead.

“You’re too young to have a stroke,” I say.

Well, maybe not too young. Forty-one, but I feel sixty and decrepit. I’m lean and wiry, but fifteen pounds underweight—150—and have not been well lately. I feel the undertow of high blood pressure, ulcers, frail nerves, fear of failure tugging at my backbone. I think about San Diego, where I was a part-time lecturer at San Diego State and worked nights in a shipyard, running a gantry, putting tons of steel in place that would one day slip down the ways as an oil tanker or a ship for the navy. I don’t want to go back there to southern California—too many people, too many houses jammed together, too much brutal traffic. Ugly brown hills in summer. Heat. Road rage. I was raised in Minnesota and Colorado. I crave green summers. I love autumn, but not winter. I thought I would love winter because it would give me time to write, but that was a pipe dream, that was pie in the sky. I sold everything to buy a farm in Wisconsin (couldn’t afford Minnesota). Now I have 140 acres and cattle to care for. I am in debt up to and beyond my ears. I had the mistaken idea that I would sit upstairs in my study finishing the novel I was writing, a semi-biographical story about a farm girl named Mamie Beaver, she who had extraordinary strength and was an idiot savant as well, and probably autistic. A fifteen year-old farm boy fell in love with her when she was twenty. I wanted to stare at white fields and be inspired to write their story, but truth is I am usually too tired to write. I work on poetry now and then, bits of it scrawled on scraps of paper I keep in my pockets. The farm and the dreams are fading, but what am I supposed to do? Give up? Go back to teaching? I don’t want to teach anymore. Go back to running heavy equipment? I’d rather not. For all its hardships, I love dairy farming. I love the cows, the land, the summer haying, the October beauty of the woods. I love the independence. The isolation. The July evenings when twilight doesn’t fail until after ten. And the only sounds are the sounds of nature getting ready for bed. Breezes sighing through the trees alongside the house. The stream twenty yards away burbling the same pacifying verse. Small rewards that add up to big reasons for staying. For risking everything at my foolish age.

Minna shifts hard against my shoulder. The movement saying, Do something!

I rub the base of her spine to calm her down. “I’m here,” I say. “Everything will be all right. Don’t worry.”

And I tell her how great she is. Best cow in the barn. When she freshens she’ll do a hundred pounds a day, and I will make sure she gets everything she needs. I have been to Fleet & Farm and bought Kow Kare, full of Vitamins A, D and E. There is liquid calcium standing by in case she goes down with milk fever. For respiratory problems, or if her calf gets scours, I have antibiotics. All the contingencies are covered, I tell myself. Nothing can happen that I can’t handle. The pain in my head increases, so I go to the milkhouse, to the medicine cabinet, and grab the bottle of Bufferin and take three with milk from the bulktank. And I think: What if it stays so cold the tractor won’t start again today? What if the electricity goes off once more? It was off ten hours yesterday. What if?

After I feed the cows, I put more straw under Minna in case she wants to lie down. Again she dances the two-step. When the contractions subside she goes back to inhaling hay as fast as she can. It is one of the things I have noticed over the years—the way cows will eat ravenously when they are distressed. Fear is gluttonous. Minna turns her head and looks at me, her nostrils flaring. A sheaf of hay in her jaw, working like a mower’s cut-bar side to side. Her rough tongue shattering leaves. Her eyes are huge and rolling, showing startled whites.

“My coo, my honey,” I sing, rubbing her backbone, rubbing her flanks.

I leave Minna and turn on the air-compressor, bring out the De Laval milk machines. It is six in the morning. I worry that my headaches and exhaustion may be symptoms of something serious. Or am I just too old to be doing this? Who starts dairy farming at forty? What fool would do that? I have no insurance and there is no money for doctors. I rub a frosted window with my sleeve and see a diffused light over the southeast horizon, the fields stretching to the forty acres of woods that I own. The trees are naked against the morning sky. Branches reaching like frozen beggars. All over Wisconsin cows and farmers are waiting anxiously for this Arctic bubble to pass. Moving the milkers, I slip the inflations on the teats of the next cow and feel an electric tingle in my hands. My palms are peeling. Dead dots of skin beg to be bitten. I nibble my palms, bite my fingernails. The lungs of the milkers breathe and the exhaust fans whir.

The barn smells of hay, warm cow, methane. Again I look out the window at the fields faintly blue in the swelling light and I wonder what if some limb cracks and brings the lines down? What if the rafters give way and the snow comes in and drowns the hay in the loft? What if I run out of propane? What if the cold lasts another week? Or two? People die this way and no one knows it until the mailman sees their mail piling up. But the snow on the roads can’t last forever. Surely the plows will be out today or tomorrow. The roads will be opened in two or three days at the most. Won’t they? I’ve got cans of soup in the pantry. I’ve got cereal. Lord knows I’ve got milk. Shifting a milk machine to Curious, I recall when she was off her feed last year and her production fell to hardly more than a quart a day. There was no apparent reason for her condition, and my mind turned over images like Taro cards for cows: mastitis thick with garget, full of white cells and fever, hard quarter feverish. Metal disease? A tiny wire gouging her stomach? Which one? First? Second? All four, maybe? Or maybe hoof rot, woody tongue, Johne’s disease, a torsion? It was one of the few times I have had to call the vet in. He came out and diagnosed a displaced abomasum. Together the vet and I rolled her, trying to release the gas and get things back in place. But it didn’t work, and finally there was nothing to do but cut her open. “Cut her or ship her,” is what he said. It was going to cost too much, but I gave him permission and watched him operate, watched him give Curious just enough anesthetic to numb her nerves but keep her standing in her stall. His scalpel cut a great gash in her hide, scarlet meat and dull white fat. The wound almost bloodless. “Shall I cut you a steak?” he asked, grinning. The incision was shaped like a giant vagina through which a micro-fog was exhaling. The fog reeking of wet organs hungry for life. The vet released the gas from her floating stomach and tied it down. Stitches hung like spider legs from the bottom of her belly. More stitches climbed up her side. Dopey-eyed and listlessly chewing cud, she was unaware of what the vet had done. And now, a year later, she has had a calf and milks well enough to earn her keep. There is nothing but the faintest scar to remind me of how she cheated death. That’s the thing I know about cows now. Given half a chance they will pull through. They are so tough so resilient, my bovinities. It was Wes Johnson who told me that I loved my cows too much. He said I shouldn’t give them names, only numbers. “You gotta grow calluses on your heart if you’re going to last,” he said. That was the day the cow named Jewel was down with sciatic nerve damage after giving birth. I had driven the tractor over to the Johnson farm to borrow a bottle of calcium because I thought Jewel had milk fever. Wes came back with me and we dripped the calcium into Jewel’s carotid artery. Then tried to get her up. She couldn’t get up no matter how we pushed and prodded. Her right hind-leg pawed helplessly, like a dog wanting to shake hands, and I told Wes it was her sciatic nerve. He agreed. We put the iron O rings around her hips and hooked the rings to a chainfall hanging from a beam in the ceiling. I cranked Jewel to her feet.

“She stands or she’s dead,” Wes told me. “That’s the rule for dairymen.”

She stood with the help of the cowlift. But she was very unsteady. She stared at me with expectation and wonder, but I could do nothing except rub the base of her spine and tell her everything would be okay. Her rear end listed starboard, her sciatic leg continually jabbing the air. I massaged the thigh and hip, digging for their chemic cores, hoping to make the blood flow warm with healing power. But it did no good.

“Naw, I’ve seen this too many times,” Wes said. “She’ll cost money and have to be slaughtered anyway. When you get this sort of thing, it’s best to shoot her. What we need to do is get her to the door, get her outside, where we can shoot her and hook her to the tractor and haul her out of the barnyard. Might as well get it over with. Times like this a farmer’s got to show no mercy, Duff.”

I said we should give her more of a chance. Give her a week. But he said it was hopeless. She wouldn’t be paying her way. He knew that I was barely breaking even. Feeding a cow that couldn’t produce was self-defeating. He had cranked her down by then and released her from the stanchion and together we pushed and pulled and tried to scoot her towards the door, but she was too heavy. Then Wes used an electric prod, shocking her. She flopped forward on her side, like a seal. The prod zapping her hips and spine, blue flames leaping from her hide. Desperately she tried to rise, her legs flapping, bouncing her thousand pounds along the concrete floor. I could see she wasn’t going to make it. I called a halt. I told Wes no more shocks. Let’s shoot her where she lies and we can snake a rope around and pull her out. I went in the house and got my rifle. When I got back I knelt beside her. Resting her anvil head against my thigh, she relaxed as I stroked her. Her eyes closing. And, angry with myself, I covered my face and wept. And Wes said, “What did I tell you? You gotta grow calluses if you’re going to last.”

“I’m not shooting her,” I told him. “Let’s get her back in her stall.”

“Jesus, Duff, you really don’t belong here.”

I was new to farming then and didn’t know how resilient cows could be. But I was convinced I shouldn’t listen to Wes too quick with the trigger. I can shoot or ship a cow if forced to, but from Jewel on, I have always given the sick ones every chance. And most of the time they’ve come back. Jewel healed. One evening a month after her leg failed her, I went to make my last rounds before going to bed, and there she was standing on her own, the right hip scarred by the cowlift, but strong enough to support her. I started laughing. I shouted her name and pounded her rump. She looked at me as if I were crazy. She got strong again. She stood in line in her stanchion to get milked. Cows do that—they surprise you. For a while anyway. For a while, just like old and ailing humans, the inevitable might be postponed. If cared for properly, most dairy cows will average five to six years or more of production before going to Packerland.

Curious flicks her tail over my arm. “You gals are lucky to have me,” I say. “I’m a sucker, that’s what I am.”

Curious shakes her head. —No you’re not, she says. You need us! And, of course, she is absolutely right.

When the milking is over, I turn my attention back to Minna. Her water has broken and the birthing sack, a gray-pink membrane, is tapping at her heels. She has quit trying to get the baby out. Her muzzle is buried inthe hay trough.

“This ain’t good,” I tell her. My head starts throbbing again. The nerves along my spine twitter as they always do when I think that something might be too much to handle. Standing behind Minna, I tell myself that this is it. I can’t take anymore. Life is too hard. I’m so goddamn old and tired. Running a dairy farm is a constant war. Well, maybe not. There are good timestoo, but this is one of the bad times. “This is one of those moments of truth,” I say aloud, “And I need help.”

Pacing the aisle, I keep thinking of Cristobell in the cold woods and working like a man possessed to pull her calf out. That baby was backwards. And after two or three hours I managed to get its hind legs up and into the steaming air. The rest was fairly simple. So I need to put my hand in Minna and find out if history is repeating itself. Stripping off chore jacket, shirt, undershirt, I go to the sink in the milkhouse, scrub my right arm with soap and hot water. I go back to Minna, leaving my hand slippery with suds.

My hand slips down a tunnel warm and easy and comes quickly to a formless mass of hair, muscle and bone. As I move my fingers around, I make out the boundary of a shoulder. Twisted backwards behind it is the calf’s neck and head. The baby is bent like a horseshoe. It’s about as bad as it can be. I have never had to deal with anything so complicated. I could get the vet to come out when the road is cleared, but that would probably be too late. And where would I get the money to pay him, anyway? For six months I’ve been in the hole and living on bank loans. I need Minna’s milk. I need Friendly and Big Mama and Beth to freshen too. They are all due. Minna stares at me, her eyes bulging with questions. “I know, I know,” I say.

—Get it out of me!

“It’s jammed, Minna. I might have to cut it up and take it out in pieces. I’ve never done that before. I don’t really know how to. I might cut you up inside. This is awful. Maybe I better just call the vet and pray he can make it in time.”

I look around as if someone is there to tell me what to do. I could call Wes. No, not him. He’d end up killing Minna for sure. There’s Tom T or Ed Liska, but I am scared of what any of them might do. Farmers can’t afford to mess around with stricken cows. There is nothing for it but to force the issue. If I don’t, Minna will die and so will her baby. At least if she dies it won’t be because I didn’t try everything I could to save her. Slipping inside her again, I force my fingers between the wedged neck and the womb wall. I try to push the baby forward, but nothing moves. I want to get my fingers in the nostrils and use them to pull the head around. But I can’t. Then Minna starts another contraction. She tightens her stomach and bears down. It feels like I’m in a vise, someone turning the handle harder, crushing my hand. The blood feels ready to burst through the tips of my fingers.

“You’re making things worse!” I yell. I struggle, cuss, groan until my strength and tolerance for pain wears out. I give up. I pull out. I turn in a circle, whipping my pulsating hand. There is blood in the sack flowing from Minna. Blood covers my hand and arm. Maybe I’ve ruptured something inside her? I shake that thought from my mind and focus on how to get the calf unwound. And that’s when I see the herding stick. It’s the one I use to herd the cows, to tap them along when they’re out in the pasture. It’s in the corner next to the door. I pick it up and snap it over my knee. At both ends of a six-inch piece I tie baling twine. Then I force the stick, like a horse’s bit, into Minna’s mouth. I pull the twine over her head and use the other part of the stick, like the handle of an auger, twisting the twine behind her ears. Using more twine, I tie the stick to her neck. It’s an old trick that Liska told me about. The pressure pulling on the cow’s mouth will often lessen the force she uses bearing down. Minna doesn’t like it at all. She shakes her head, her ears sounding like wooden clappers.

Again my hand goes inside and feels the baby. I am able to push it forward slightly. I can almost get my hand around and slide it along the curve of the neck.

“It’s working,” I tell her. “I can feel its ear! I got its ear in my hand!”

But the shaking of Minna’s head causes the stick to work loose and the bit to fall out. The next thing I know she is crushing my fingers again. I retreat once more and yell at her, telling her to be still. Doesn’t she know I’m trying to help her? “Stupid cow! Quit shaking!” She hangs her head. She snuffs hay.

Walking to the far end of the barn, I look out the window at the fields of snow. Such a long winter. So much intense cold. “Deal with it. Deal with it.” That’s what my grandfather, a farmer all his life, would tell me if he were alive. As if sensing the turmoil within the barn, a coyote howls. I’ve heard that sound for months, the howl coming from somewhere around the southern curve, where the land plunges into the woods. I think of the coyote that followed the haybine last summer catching mice. And I wonder if the howl is hers. Sun spills over the windowsill and brightens the glass. I hear Minna shift again.

—Come here! she commands.

I go back to the wooden bit, slip it in her mouth and tie it so tightly to her neck I’m afraid I might choke her. Grabbing a two-foot piece of baling twine, I cinch one end around my hand and once more enter Minna. With the twine looped between two probing fingers, I place the heel of my hand against the calf’s shoulder and push it as hard as I can. It shifts forward and gives me some wiggle room. Minna is busy fighting the bit in her mouth.

Wedging my fingers between the canal and the calf’s neck I slip them down a narrow passage. And then I feel the ear again. Then an eye. The nose, the nostrils. I slip the noose around the nose and tighten it.

“Got it.”

I push the calf forward, while my outside hand pulls the baling twine. Push and pull, push and pull, and slowly the head eases around. And finally faces the way out. Going back in with the twine and slipping the noose around the hooves I push and pull some more and ease the legs upward. I can see the hooves now, two yellow-white wedges. I pull them into the light. “Let go now,” I say, untying the wooden bit. “I want you to bear down now. Bear down hard, Minna!”

As I pull on the little hooves, Minna does what I tell her and the calf slides through and into my arms, soaking me with warm birthing fluid. The calf is dead. Opening the legs I see I have a male. Now it’s coyote food. Laying the dead calf in the aisle, I tell myself that at least Minna is still alive.

“The calving is done,” I tell her. “It’s over, Minna.”

But even as I stand there panting and wishing I could take a bath and go to bed, I see a bubble pushing out of Minna’s vagina. The bubble is purple. It gets bigger and bigger. Inside it I see a pair of hooves. “I got another, I got twins,” I say. “No wonder it was so jammed up in there! Minna, what’re you doing, girl? Supercow or what?”

Breaking the sack, I grab the hooves and soon another baby is soaking in my arms. This one is a heifer. She’s alive. There’s a starburst on her forehead and her belly is white. The rest of her is black. “Get a load of you!” I say, rubbing the heifer with straw. I carry her around to the manger and set her in front of Minna, who gives the baby a good tongue-lashing, stimulating her blood. The other cows strain in their stanchions, nostrils flaring, smelling the calf and wanting to lick her.

“You’ve got thirty-seven aunts,” I say, feeling hopeful, even a little optimistic. In a while the baby is up, staggering cow-to-cow, getting sniffed, snorted at, and properly licked. She blinks at a brand new world.

- Where am I?

•

When their winter confinement is over, the herd is let out of the barn. Some of the younger ones go nuts and run like overgrown children back and forth over the pasture. They bawl. They butt each other. They kick up their heels. A few of them, as if by magic turned into bulls, mount their sisters. The older cows keep their dignity, moving away and browsing new tufts of grass. Along the pasture’s southern peninsula, the trees are thickening with leaves. In the afternoon the herd gathers in the shade of those leaves to sleep, chew cud, stare lazily into space. The dawdling wind is soothing. We’ll live forever like this, won’t we? the cows always ask me.

My little farm still has its crisis every other day or so—one thing or another breaking down, this or that cow getting sick, a calf with pneumonia, bills coming in that I can’t pay. But it isn’t anything that breaks me yet. At this point in time I am unaware how right Wes Johnson is. I don’t belong in farming. By May of next year, 1984, the farm will go under and everything will be auctioned off—the cows, machinery, furniture—and in the freedom of defeat I will leave Wisconsin for what will happen over the next few years.

Things will fall apart. The center will not hold. And eventually, I will travel many roads, a world of wandering—state-to-state, city-to-city, job after job—until one day I will find myself in southern California teaching again, and working on my novel. I’ll be hating the dead, dry hills, the heat, the traffic. I’ll be hating the fact that I’m getting too old to be a novelist or get a full-time position, with tenure track, medical and retirement benefits.

My lost farm will give a hard birth to The Book of Mamie, which I will send out dozens of times to dozens of agents and publishers and be dismissed with form letter rejections for over two years. But then in my 46th year I will get a phone call from Toby Olson and Andrea Barrett telling me that I have won the AWP Best Novel Award. The University of Iowa will publish it. Soon I’ll have an agent, an editor, and a publishing house for my second novel. Mamie is a book that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been a dairy farmer and written about cows and the good and the bad of loving them and the land I once owned. So, maybe it was worth it? Or maybe not.

How do you measure these things? Six novels later, I continue to write and it’s as hard as ever to get published, which is why I’m still teaching on a part-time basis. Writers, don’t quit your day job. Had I been successful and stayed on the farm it would be twenty-two years now. And I’ve often wondered what if—what if my blood pressure, the migraines, the ulcers and the ceaseless work had killed me? And I was nurturing the grass covering a plot in a Wisconsin cemetery? What might then have been said about my time as a dairyman? Impossible question. But it’s not impossible to know what I would want engraved on my headstone. Carved in granite below my name and dates, in simple scroll, I would like my epitaph to say: HERE LIES DUFF BRENNA. HE HAD A WAY WITH COWS.