They Are the Last

For Beverly

Behind her tongue

with its language of grass

and passion for salt,

behind the heavy tongue

deft nevertheless

as a blind man's hand,

a cow in good health chews

approximately fifty times

before reswallowing the cud.

It appears the animals

Beverly

are emigrating: their America

the constellations in the sky

Lizard, Lion, Great Bear,

Ram, Bull, Crow,

Hare . . .

perhaps the more prudent

like the agouti

have chosen the milky way.

Put your ear to her flank

and you will hear

the tide of her four stomachs.

Her second, like a net,

has the name of a constellation:

Reticulum. Her third,

the Psalterium, is like

the pages of a book.

When she falls sick

and lacks the will to chew

her four stomachs fall

silent as a hive in winter.

Each year more animals depart.

Only pets and carcasses remain,

and the carcasses living or dead

are from birth

ineluctably and invisibly

turned into meat.

'I believe it's completely feasible,'

said Bob Rust

of Iowa State University,

'to specifically design 

an animal for hamburger.'

Elsewhere 

the animals of the poor

die with the poor

from protein insufficiency.

When fetched from the pastures

they bring into the cool stable

the heat of the orchard

and the hot breath of wild garlic.

To clean out the cowshed

scatter a little of

the mare's dung

it absorbs their shit

liquid as springtime

and green with grass.

And fasten them well tonight

bed them with beech leaves

Beverly

they are the last.

Now that they have gone

it is their endurance we miss.

Unlike the tree

the river or the cloud

the animals had eyes

and in their glance

was permenance.

It was the same fox for ever and ever.

To kill him

was to drag him

momentarily

from the earth

of his eternity.

Once flies and crows

when devouring the dead sheep

began with the eyes.

Yet the ewe

had already lambed

her permenance.

The buzzard circled

biding his everlasting time

as repeatedly

as the mountain.

Out of the single night

came the day's look,

the wary glance

on every side.

Once the animals flowed like their milk.

Now they have gone

it is their endurance we miss.

*

'The breeding sow,' it is said,

'should be thought of and treated

as a valuable piece of machinery

whose function

is to pump out baby pigs.'

*

Sometimes still,

when you are pouring

from the white jug,

the milk

reminds me of the geese

who like dogs

guarded the house.

John Berger, 2001.