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.
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