Cows Came Down from Snow-Clad Hills

Hereford Cows Remembered - 50 Years Ago

Pastoral

James Hart 

for my mother,

Alene Wagaman Hart

(1918-1990)

My mother could call Herefords
from the snow with just a word
sung out across the white distance.
Coming alive with hungry music,
plumes of mist shot from muzzles
snorting in the glacial air
as each beast breathing a fog
would heave from sheltered beds
in the grove behind the hill,
leaving imperfect cow shapes
behind them in the matted turf.
Grim, determined in such cold,
they trail across the white,
nosing toward the feeding field.
They move like ghost bison,
metamorphosed misshapenly
until their bodies’ warmth
begins to craze the snow
on their backs like the glaze
of the chipped ironstone china
my mother served our own food on.
And like the breakfast I’d eaten,
vapor rose from the broad plates
of their backs as they shoved,
butted, nosing the best bits of hay.
Bound in my dad’s cast-off coats
and booted to stand hard ground,
my mother spoke to them
their good cow names:
Bessie, Belinda, and Belle,
until she’d fed the whole herd
with words they did not need.
Shouldering his harem aside
as if his hunger became human,
our young bull would crowd
the inner circle to stand under
my mother’s hand proffering
hay and quick, firm caresses
across those broad blank brows,
eyes rapt in labyrinthine bonds,
mouths sprouting straws, grasses,
white faces bristling frosted fur.

(From an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)