Kilter
BY HENK ROSSOUW
In the barn tonight I listen half-asleep to the cow named Crassula
give a low sound after giving birth to her nameless
veal calf. Licking him onto his feet, Crassula has a harmon mute
lodged in the silver trumpet of her throat, her rapture
modulated by the knowledge, bodily —my boyhood guess—
that the one she welcomes with her tongue into the world of air
will go in the back of a cattle truck, filling the valley with dust.
Crassula is my kin tonight. If a social worker were to ask me
to draw my house, it would be all one box, the farmhouse
and the barn. Father, absent mother, a child and twelve cows.
I fall asleep in the straw, until her calf begins to walk.
When the single-wire electric fence, subdividing the pasture,
collapses in the wind the next afternoon, the herd comes home
on their own, udders full, their hind legs as if pylons. My father
keeps the veal calf out of Crassula’s sight. The cadence
of the stainless steel he attaches at dusk to their udders—
suck, release, suck, release—converts the herd into machines
eating oats. Crassula’s low sound echoes in the empty barn,
long after the cattle truck camouflages my face with dust.
I taught her calf to drink from a bucket. I let him slurp
on my finger dipped in her milk, to get him used to the hands of his kin
near his temple, used to the suck and release of the bolt.
