The Cow

I used to think of this creek as a river

springing from mineral caverns

of moonmilk and slime,

but really it’s just a slow thread of water

that comes from somewhere up north

to trickle its way out

near the edge of our property.

And I’ve always imagined

the toolshed as it is,

though it was once

an outbuilding for a watermill

whose wheel and timbers

have been reborn

as exposed rafters and flooring

for the Old Money in the valley.

The day before my grandfather died

he drove a diesel flatbed

to the edge of the creek

and paid ten day laborers

to unload this shed.

He left his will on the shed floor,

which wasn’t a will

as much as it was a quick note

scrawled on the pink edge of an invoice

for a few bundles of chicken wire.

I found the note

and showed it to no one.

This shed should have the smell

of seed packets and mousetraps.

It should have a calendar

whose pages haven’t turned since Truman.

The sounds of usefulness and nostalgia

should creak from its hinges,

but instead there’s nothing

but a painting the size of a dinner plate

that hangs from an eightpenny nail,

a certain style of painting

where the wall of a building

has been lifted away

to reveal the goings-ons of each room,

which, in this case, is a farmhouse

where some men and women

sit around the geometry

of a kitchen table playing pinochle,

a few of the women laughing

a feast-day kind of laughter,

and one of the men, a fat one

in overalls with a quick brushstroke

for a mouth, points up

as if to say something

about the death or the rain

or the reliable Nordic construction

of the rafters.

A few of the children

gathered in a room off to one side

have vaguely religious faces—

they’re sitting on the floor around their weak

but dependable uncle

who plays something festive

on the piano. The piano

next to the fireplace, the fireplace lit,

a painting of the farmhouse

hanging above the mantel.

What passes for middle C

ripples away from the uncle, the children,

the pinochle game—

the wobbling note finally collapsing

in the ear of the cow

standing in perfect profile

at the far right of the painting.

The cow is gray and blue

and orange. This is the cow

that dies in me every night,

the one that doesn’t sleep

standing up, or sleep at all,

but stamps through the pasture muck

just to watch the suckholes she makes

fill with a salty rot-water

that runs a few inches

below the surface of everything here.

The cow noses through

the same weak spot in the same fence,

and every night finds herself

moving out beyond the fields

of her dumb, sleeping sisters.

The cow in me has long admired

the story the night tells itself,

the one with rifle shots and laughter,

gravel roads crunching under pickups

with their engines and lights cut,

the story with the owls

diving through the circles

their iron silences

scratch into the air.

The cow in me never makes it past

the edge of the painting—

and she’s not up to her knees in mud,

she’s knee-deep in a cattle guard.

Bone and hoof and hoods of skin

dangle below the steel piping

into the clouds of the underworld.

The cow cries, and her cry

slits the night open and takes up house.

The cry has a blue interior

and snaps like a bonfire stoked

with dry rot and green wood.

The cry is a pitcher of ink that never spills,

until it does, until it scrawls itself

across the fields and up into the trees.

The cry works in the night

like a dated but efficient system.

The cry becomes a thread of black water

where the death-fish spawn.

The cry makes a little eddy

around the fat man’s finger.

It turns the pinochle deck

into the sounds of the creek

trickling into nothing.

The cry watches my grandfather

weeping over the only thing

he said to my father

in two decades,

which he didn’t say at all

but penned onto a crumpled invoice

that found its way to the nowhere

of my hands.

The cry in the cow

in the painting in me

rotates in the night

on a long axle of pain,

and the night itself

has no vanishing point.