At Nightfall
Like held lanterns, wavering,
almost gone out,the cows' white faces turn towards me
as their bodies pivot, needles to magnetic north.
Squared off, they still, and stare.
I can barely make out the nostrils' dilation
trying to forage my scent
from the currents of air, or the draped-velvet
black of their coats, its crushed sheen.
As if all the brightness so recently
glazing these hills had gone into them when it went,
had burnished the heavy flanks
with the gas-blue flame whose low hiss
is the letting down milk, or had opened
the dewlaps' deep curtains and stepped in behind,
drawing closed the body's opacity after.
Though some small part escapes still,
leaking through as we stand in mutual regard:
two cows, two calves, and a two-legged—
homelier animal, if truth be spoken, even than they.
Each of us pinned on the axis that spins out this dusk
as a pupa spins out her cocoon,
white as the coming-in fog being spun just now by the sea,
or the milk spooling down its long thread
into udders that guard the passage
from all other lifetimes to this. In the true north,
that no iron points to, the first stars scratch into
the compass-glass of the sky. One calf,
grown restless, and pleased enough with this world,
butts the side of his dam; she shifts a little,
addresses me gravely a final question, then moves away—
right, I know, not to trust either me or my kind.
Then the fog reaches this place at the moment of darkness
and even the stars go out, recede to the unfenced field
of the no longer seen. There, an assembly
greets them: the man, met once for an hour,
who gave me the book he was reading;
the wooden recorder sighed into until I was ten,
tucked safely back in its sock of brown felt;
the seven lost watches, three rings, and near them
the rhinestone pin, picked out for a teacher truly loved—
all the hard discarded and easily lost,
the gone to the pastures of gone. In a shadowy line, the cows
enter: first cow, then calf, then second cow,
then second calf, each broad nose following closely
each knotted-rope tail. They pause and gaze, seem content,
then lower their heads to the grass that rises
from under the twinned quarter-moons of their hooves.
The grass grows green and greener: it is full daylight,
the air become warm, and filled with the cloverleaf-traffic
of flies. And though a dog is barking—
the white one, waving the plume of her tail—
the cows do not startle, beyond that now as they are,
so the barking continues, gaily, for a long time, though
growing more faint as I make my way up the side of the hill,
taking the path by foot-feel, leaving the low fog behind,
until suddenly from this side another dog answers,
equally happy but this one freckled, half-black, half-white,
with a tobacco-twist of color behind each ear;
answers and comes through the darkness, silencing crickets,
wagging me home, urging me faster, forward,
into the impatient present, its spoked-wheel turnings,
wobblings, desires, where I—she seems quite sure of it—
belong.
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