Essays 11–14

Stacy Szymaszek

ESSAY 11

I would not

have guessed

that Wren

and I would become friends

I thought her attentions were strictly

apple-motivated but she comes to me even

when I am not presenting an apple

which to her probably looks like

a brown orb as cows perceive reds

and greens in tones of brown

she puts her head down

and lets me scratch behind her ears

between her eyes and the small of her horns

I learned that each birth leaves

one ring on their horns

when they are allowed to keep

their horns Wren has at least

five rings on her very tall horns which will

continue to grow as long as she lives

they are warm and full of air space that connect to her

sinuses yesterday she took the apple but let it fall out of her

mouth twice then followed me into the sun and closed

her eyes I could hear her breathing so

started breathing with her as I had been

tense all day she started lightly snoring

still adjusting her ears to the sound of the

piglets screeching over old bread

the calf Wren is carrying was sired by a bull

named Hansel his sires have been

stillborn or coming out with “bad placements”

giving the cows difficult births so

I worry for Wren who is due in January.

ESSAY 12

I heard that it takes up to thirty minutes to get into deep

concentration which could explain why I write in my head

while I’m driving to and from work and then wait and see what my meno-

pause mind can recall capitalism

is a real war monger loving war and

the language of war (its metaphors) so I must battle

we must fight for everything

and have mighty will I have practiced

death for so long all that remains for my body

to do is physically die all that remains

for the organization to do is to die.

I realized that if I had a money job in the arts

right now I would lose it I feel lucky to have

made a life in a barn of cows working out the tendencies

of the mind to cling and of the heart to close to suffering

so many past puzzles have worked themselves out

now that the power cat is out of the power bag

I only get closer to this shaggy calve who has found

her mother’s friend last week she had snot in her nose

which after we rubbed heads ended up in my hair

which already stands on end

my colleague kindly cleaned it up with a corner

of my lunch bag I didn’t care I could’ve been covered

in her snot and been pleased I want to say

something like we experienced solidarity

but I don’t know if that is what it is

in the animal economy in all the brutal economies

that will kill me in slyer ways most of our affections

occur as policy allows my lunch break their groupings and rotating pastures

an ever-shifting ship list I wonder if a little

heifer conditioned to associate her farm humans

with dopamine rushes feels good when she makes a

farm human laugh? As my human solidarities

grow more sharply ideological and

laughter wears thin I wonder this.

At the holiday staff party

in line for food I chatted with a farmer who

broke his eye contact with me when I started talking

about Donut I said uh oh he said he didn’t have a lot

of hope for her she’s plucky what does that

mean? not hearty he said a crumb of cracker

went down the wrong pipe as I tried to sort out

that plucky was a bad quality and meant in farmer language

not hearty the more I tried

to be impassive the more I choked

on the cracker I drove home in the rain

and that night when I closed my eyes

I was again visited by white blobs that turned into cow

shapes grazing on blob grass but this time more detail came

into focus I could see little hairs around the ears I could

be ill or these hallucinations could be the random firing of cells

time will tell the reason I become friends with

any cow is because they are interested

in me there are cows that are more wild who

want nothing to do with me I started to get the sense that

my connection with certain cows was fated and divine

I had a quick fantasy that I was rich and could protect

them by giving the farm a huge amount of money

to care for my special group a nightmare philanthropist

but if I am honest the heart of the matter is to be able to keep

loving in the face of cow-sorrow unspeakable brevity

unpredictability and contradictions

to bravely do it against such powerful forces as this

is thus also plucky.

ESSAY 13

I drove through valleys of fog day after day

in the El Niño winter Catskill Creek overspilled its western bank

by over 200 feet swept away an elderly woman in her car

who drove around the road flooded sign

people are surprised by how easily water can overpower us

this is what my dad said followed by advice the trick

is to roll down your window before submersion

otherwise you’ll never get the door open

we talk about the weather he’s having

in the Midwest which comes eastward to my town

along the latitude line we share over the past weeks

I’ve heard songs that have Midwestern cities and states in their titles

John Hyatt’s “All the Lilacs in Ohio” Dar Williams’s “Iowa (Traveling III)”

and Lucinda Williams’s “Minneapolis” I haven’t heard

any Wisconsin songs where I’m from but many people

on the East coast think Milwaukee is Minneapolis

when my parents were house hunting

in the 70s they took us to see

a farm house but didn’t end up buying it instead

we lived in the suburbs where I shed my animal

dreams. Today my partner

and I rewatched Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service

paused on the heart to heart Kiki has with

her friend Ursula who says “The spirit of witches

the spirit of artists the spirit of bakers

I suppose it must be a power given by God

Sometimes you suffer for it.”

I’ve never thought of suffering in the gift

economy suffering in exchange for the power

and protection of poetry but in the most shit storm repellent suit

it still gets in your face. While Kiki looks

for a town to live in she falls asleep on a train

full of hay is awakened by cows licking her

feet apologizes to them for sleeping

on their breakfast Miyazaki cows are friends

I’m so attuned to their shapes I spied a cow cookie

jar in the background shot of a sitcom a distant cow

laying behind a tree in Pennsylvania and

the Holstein that is a cat that sometimes graces

our backyard. I am able to see

now how Donut isn’t as hearty as her peers

on Thursday I thought she was dashing toward me till

I saw that one of her nurse cows had risen and she was after

some milk had to scurry with another calve as the cow

was not in the mood I tried to assist by scratching the cow’s head

I think her name is Layla she stayed still for a minute

allowing the calves to drink I remembered

after Donna gave birth to her she immediately went for

the colostrum she needed but Donna was Donna.

Money talks and what it blabs is that life is not precious

not even for an animated girl witch who loses her ability to fly

and communicate with her cat because her delivery job burned her out

I tell myself in the face of fear that my life is not

precious I tell myself this doing my stretches

if all disease is eternally present

into the loafing shed I go

irredeemable inflamed but with my gift of leadership

that points to one rogue end via a million

collaborative routes my life is not precious not more precious

than the the life of a cow or any low down being so much can happen

in thirty-shed-minutes the elongation of a moment

into a collapse of time rejoicing the prehistory of wild aurochs

an ethic of all life as continuous and convivial the perfect

banality with which I returned to my office.

ESSAY 14

The poet Sachio Itō was a dairy farmer

wrote lines about brushing the cows daily and how

his clothes must stink it is such a smell it is

such a beautiful smell that there is no one word for

so I will say it is the smell of time

the hot fermented core of living matter

the inner hay that can look like

seaweed that is the basis of my winter routine

meeting Wren in the back part of the dry cow paddock

to feed her this prized hay she is never willing

to share using her huge horns to clear space

around her so the others can only watch as she

gets the best bits Cairo being among the others I’ve worked out

a way to feed them both by giving Wren a mouthful and then rushing

to the other side to feed Cairo today Wren took an apple

and let me scratch her head but she likes it best when

we are close but not touching I learned that she is

part Brangus Brahman mixed with Angus and

something else I forgot the closer I feel

to some cows the harder it gets to narrate is best

conveyed by the harmony running through my playlist

or low excitement that we call a habit or somehow coalescing

in thin air innocence and horror of being. We sang to the cows

during Saturnalia “the cattle are lowing the baby awakes…” the

belief holds that on Christmas Eve animals gain

the “gift of speech” at midnight but what

if humans gained the gift of going on olfactory cues

reading degrees of muscle tension

nonverbal auditory sounds such as lowing and waking

Itō wrote “when cowherds begin to make poems

  many new styles

  in the world

  will spring up”

when cow herders begin to make poems

we will gain the gift of mooing

the oldest surviving English poem was written by a herder

in the 600s named Cædmon who was said to have been illiterate

but after a dream visitation was able to to sing words

that he had never heard of before the oldest known poem is

of course Gilgamesh whose mother’s name Ninsun

means “wild cow” she helped her son interpret

his dreams. In The Story of Ferdinand the bull grew up

to become entirely himself the real life gentle Civilón “Large

Civilian” a colloquial slur Spanish soldiers used

for ordinary citizens was granted a rare pardon after a bullfight but

before he could make it back to his pasture and the farmer’s

daughter who loved him Franco’s

militiamen butchered him and ate him before

the resistance could drive them away.

In December a young Longhorn steer

they say escaped a slaughterhouse in Newark ended

up on NJT tracks causing long delays he was rescued

by a sanctuary and is recovering from an infection they named

him Ricardo after a helpful police officer I just watched a video

of him eating apples with his IV and balls of tape

on the tips of his horns he is sweet and calm with

a chestnut coat as always with feel good local

news one can always sense the hand of management. The bull

at the farm I work at is named Luke his mating

bellow interrupts our meetings and keeps

the apprentices living next to the shed up at night

during lunch last week my colleague

and I witnessed Luke mate with

a cow an apprentice came up and asked

“was he successful” if it takes 4 seconds I think so

the pair gently clacked their horns

he continued to follow her inhaling

her estrus his lips curled and nostrils

partly closed I learned this is called the Flehmen

response in the chaos of mating I still kept up the effort to comb

Donut whose long winter coat has been patchy due to a winter’s lack

of vitamin D the hierarchy kicked into high formal

the rhythmic body sweep of the feeding

stalls such that Donut and I had to refind

each other every few minutes.