Messages From Carrie
A poem and story from Kappy's Farm
November 10th, 2008
My friend Kappy has a cow named Vista. She loves this cow with great tenderness and the knowing amusement of an inside joke. Each rose tinged morning and indigo evening Kappy coaxes creamy milk from Vista’s plentiful udder. Kappy draws long open-handed strokes down Vista’s broad bovine side. She mixes this companionable affection with Vista’s alfalfa, oats and cracked feed corn. In return, Vista bestows upon this woman a steady brown gaze, the smell of dusty hay and stainless steel buckets of body-warmed gratitude. Both woman and cow consider this to be an affable arrangement, a contract of contentment. I followed Kappy into the barn wearing her teenage son’s oversized chore boots. In the crisp October air I a silent horned owl flies across the Wisconsin moon. On mortally quiet wings he will glide toward a stand of woods at the edge of the pasture. No mice near the barn, where fifteen working cats and kittens take their commission to guardianship seriously. When the milking is done, Kappy fills and sets out two saucers worth. The calicos, greys and long tailed tigers gather around. They are purring loudly and full of themselves, so regal, so fierce and protective of the grain and oats that Vista ruminants into cream and milk somewhere in the secret compartments of her four stomachs. Kappy washes the emptied udder while Vista finishes her grain, and just for a moment she leans her forehead into the comfort of a contented cow. “It was a long summer” she says, “hot and dry and forever with the letting go of it.” I nod and look out the barn door, at the full moon, at the stand of trees, at the sheep and dogs that look up and sniff the wind for the hints of change.
I know that tomorrow Kappy will pasteurize Vista’s milk in a clean container next to her kitchen sink. She will distribute chilled glass gallon jars to her neighbors and her neighbor’s children. Sometimes she trades the milk for handmade soaps or chicken feed, but mostly she gives it away without salute or flourish. With Vista’s milk the new and lengthening bones of her neighbor’s children grow stronger.
Vista is good at being a cow, and she does this without tribute or extra credit. Kappy is good at loving her cow, which she also does without fuss or fanfare. There in hay-scented barn in October I can believe that the extraordinary motions of love are the most ordinary and predictable of occurrences. Although the night hunter will hunt, and the cats will puff themselves up, full of their necessity, the ruminations of love and generosity will stand quietly and faithfully alongside. I sense that as surely as the moon shines full and clear in a Midwestern October sky, there is reason to believe in love.
Water-Chicks Learn To Drink
The chicks were one day old
Exactly
These eventual layers of eggs
Had just emerged from eggs.
Which came first
Is of course
The usual dilemma.
The postal clerk smiled
as she handed me a sturdy cardboard box
With holes in the sides.
The newborn chicks peeped sweetly,
Tiny yellow fluffs of new air
Pressed in and out
Through perfect egg-shaped lungs.
Chicks do not know how to drink when they are born,
This being an aquired skill
Taught by feathered mothers.
So I became a hen,
Sitting cross legged beneath the heat lamp.
Holding them one by one,
Small chick hearts beating,
In my careful enormous hands.
I dipped each tiny orange beak
In a little plastic bowl,
Encouraging them to swallow,
With a gentle thumb stroke,
To their infinitely tiny throats,
Until their baby bird eyes widen,
Blinking with awe and astonishment ,
“Oh my Gawd and Jesus in his skivvies
Water.”
-Carrie Newcomer