cow poem
it is a day for poetry that is to say
one like any other full of sunshine paddocks
and cold at heart
all day I speak to screen poets
the artless machine gives me breath
and words and
I am sitting in
a paddock far away a cow roars out
even I can tell distress from love
in cows
in others it’s not so easy
blue seeps in at the curtains
of my cow-isolated study
I warn it off with words
there is too much at stake
to start loving now
the phone nags
and there only people
I don’t love
they make their demands
time money an honest opinion
a dance
I don’t want to hold hands
there is no one whose thigh I want
to cross no particular blizzard eye I want to
capture
I make the print big with fine
resolution
the cow is giving birth
and someone is in trouble the dairyman
– I know his name –
will come in slow urgent
paces across the paddock
and watch not wishing
to disturb her his girl full of hope in a field
of good winter feed
there is nothing to the print
the page rolls past like a lowing
poets fall off and fail
clipped by time they thought they were immortal
and not one was
a comet the size of a swimming pool
glides over and we don’t notice our near extinction
astronomers should take more care we’re not hit
by the unpredictable
again
she lows in the paddock
and the dairyman – Phil – judges with squinty eyes
it’s a matter of economics this love
I write cheques
to poets petite commercial haikus of trust
it must
be the end of the financial world
the mail drips in
another poem comes reeling up this is a bluster
of words
high as a blue sky the cow says
and Phil the master cowman strides over the field
of the poem there is food for thought in this green
poet
he takes the cow by the horns
and speaks to her in low tones
then he grasps the calf by the legs and for a while
there is an ten-legged beast his two her four
and the four of the new
she bellows out and Phil
pulls the legs and the poems come up on the screen too much
too many poems and the new beast is born
—Chris Mansell
____
from her latest book (Love Poems, Kardoorair Press, Armidale, 2006)