(about 1992)
Reminiscent are the times I remember
with some sort of excitement the mud-cloudy
chocolate-vanilla, fly-swattery cows
of Grandpa's field. The rainy day
I stared up at their sappy pink noses
and held my breath as their mammoth tongues
dropped heavily through their jaws busily
chewing their cud, and I looked up again
at the white-gray clouds painted on the sky.
Feeling the mud-puddles beneath my feet,
I realized the cows matched the day.
Their brown spots as sloshy and misformed
as the splattered mud covering the vast landscape
of the field. The white surrounding the brown spots
much like the clouds surrounding
the auburn blanket of smog from dusty chimneys.
I wished it weren't raining.
There had been bright summers of hot-grass aroma
and bare feet, when the cows stood apart from
a green field and azure skies. The only thing
that included them in hot summer days
were their tails: swiping away the buzzing flies,
like Grandma's brown fly-swatter with a white handle.
Swish, swish . . . but the rain still fell, and the only
swish, swish . . . was the sound of Grandpa's galoshes
as he walked down the path by the knotted fence
to the rickety barn . . . and the cows turned
with their guffaws and found their way also to the barn
so as to involve their brown and white
lives in some excitement
other than a small girl staring with caramel eyes
of rappelling thought, remembering again that summer
she stared at the cows for almost and hour
as her chocolate and vanilla twist cone dripped . . .
like the rain.
