Cow Poetry: In the Flat Field

Poetry

by Elizabeth Enslin | 1 Comments

Thank you for sending your cow poems inspired by Nate Ronniger's paintings.

I watch their tongues
like snails without shells
curling around smooth brome
They tear and grind
tear and grind and circle
a mound of composting sod
ten feet high

A mostly white one
with black half moons
over each eye
breaks from the herd
climbs the mound
and bellows louder than a monk
on a conch shell

There aren't many people in these lonely canyons
to judge those of us who talk to animals,
so I say,

What?

Moo is how English translates what she says
though if you've ever heard a cow hollering
you know that's not right.

What do you want?
Greener grass?

She flaps an ear pierced
by a numbered tag
and stares at me
or maybe past me

You smell something?
A cougar?

She flicks her tail side to side,
dusting flies from the black Milky Way
on her white haunches

I hear a bull snorting
down by the spring

Is that it?
Moooooo.

I consider other reasons
for her ascent
A chance at
singularity

A reach for something beyond -
and perhaps more heroic than -
our meditative attempts to be in
a cud-chewing present

Before I can formulate these deeper questions
a white cow with a rusty meteor
on her forehead
butts the pied cow
down
the mound's
other side

Elizabeth Enslin received a 2009 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Oregon Arts Commission. Her literary nonfiction appears in The Gettysburg Review, Crab Orchard Review, Opium Magazine, Fringe Magazine,The Truth About the Fact, The Smoking Poet, In the Mist, and Oregon Literary Review. She divides her time between a house in Portland and a yurt in northeastern Oregon.

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