The Cow

There I was, snagged in barbed-wire,
bawling through clenched teeth, bands
of phlegm at my lips, having already left
behind flesh on the humming wire, imagining
myself capable of standing. With hands—
like the absent farmer's, with his vulgar
pride in mediocrity, his waterlogged
pornography, his Great Dane called Hamlet—
instead of these clumsy mud-clotted hooves.
In work boots-a tattoo of snow in the pattern
of a paddlewheel on my coat—clipping
the farmer and his people above the ankles,
like mallards, from the frozen pond, impaling
them with straightened bedsprings
for posing — their eyes like train windows,
blank and daubed with pollen, their bodies thrown
over my shoulder, legs bundled like iris stems.

Copyright © 2009 Adam Day All rights reserved
from MARGIE
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission