Cow days
James Bowden
Sometimes
I feel like a cow
What with how often I am called to milk myself.
I have built up enough material for a poem,
and so forth it must come. What I mean is:
I feel a great sadness. I should just keep grazing,
anything to keep my head tamped down, but my teat
feels like it’s going to explode and I can’t sit still, I rove
and run like a bitch in a heat. I plod down the street
and there’s a board proclaiming, I love because
I am love, and I think, wow, hey, that’s just like
me, I am love, and I redouble my resolve to
smile at each person I come into contact with
but a Chinese woman walks by me with sunnies
and her head doesn’t even tilt a millimeter. It’s hard,
I say, to love what won’t even look you in the eye. I
am not so sure that I am even conscious in many of the
in-between moments, and maybe this is good and then
maybe this is excuse enough for us all. It’s too hard
to be alive all the time, autopilot saves us, TV saves us,
do we live for each moment?, or the in-betweens,
or for those cool, dry seconds of clarity when I
inhale and know that I, I!, am here, cockpit and
helm and all? I’m playing with my beard and thinking
of my little brother, how delighted he would be to
run his damp little fingers through the course ropes of
my chin, tickling me where I am weak, my neck.
Charlie Brown says that happiness is a warm puppy
and I say it’s you, hot cheek brushing against me
in your dreamy bliss, eyelids heavy with trust. Just be
here. Just be here. Remember The Notebook? Once,
in the simmer after much strife, I told my Indian ex-
girlfriend that if she was a beef, I was a beef. We
stitched ourselves silly and by god, we loved. I hope
when I die
they make me into chicken tikka masala. Am I allowed
to bequeath that? But excuse me: I must go to milk
myself. Excuse me: I’m thinking of starting to talk
aloud to myself, so that I may understand that I
am separate from myself. So that when they take
me away, I won’t ruin the dish by kicking and getting
lactic acid everywhere. Do you under stand me?
I am looking for a basis for acceptance of every,
like really every, thing. Excuse me: did you know
that Charlie Parker played Bossa Nova? Did you
know that my favorite musician is ashamed of
his too-idyllic, white, Wisconsinian childhood?
Should he be? The low sounds he makes vibrate
in the hollow of my chest and: comfort. Has anyone
the right to be ashamed of anything? The butcher?
The hand, rough, pumping me dry? Excuse me!
What I mean to say is: you’re on your way to
visit the plum trees. And you want to be a skeptic
and you want to be like hey is this even real and
hey, what’s the big deal with all of this anyway but
then you get there and blossoms are swirling
around into everywhere and bees buzz scary but
don’t sting your toughened hide and when you go to
open your mouth, all that comes out is a rumbling
in your chest, a purring, a sigh, a moo.