Sundays, a white city pickup truck steams slowly through the side street spraying for mosquitoes. The fog machine's engine, an insect, drowns out the sound of the truck's engine, a steady gearless whine. The fog itself leaps from a funnel off the bed, appears to propel the truck along, a jet of clouds under pressure. The white spray dissipates, gets grayer as it spreads, and, heavier than air, it trails the truck, a wake that spreads and skirts the curbs of the street. It spills down the hill, fills the hollow, evaporates like that afternoon's rain turning the concrete to vapor. Later, the truck crisscrosses the grid in the neighborhood, the sound muted and amplified by the spaces between houses, the trees, the yards, and the residue settles into the bunkers of the golf course, a ground blizzard sweeping over the greens, a fluid tarp. Above, the moon breaks up, fogged in the fog as it sets through it. The summer air twice thickened.
FALL
White pine. The new needles replace needles that fall as straw, rake into springy piles in the gutter. The hardwoods stay bare limbed, leaves exhausted. Clouds of mistletoe are caught in the branches, twig mist. The spindly azalea understory. Too far north for Spanish moss, the trees trap trashed plastic bags. But in the crevices and corners and on the stripped branches, lint from the cotton fields gathers. On the scored red brick and the dull mortar in between, woolly cotton patches of the stuff stuffs the joints, points the grout, a seeping spun sugar. The lint escapes the screened-in trailer trucks of the raw harvest or gets kicked up by the gleaning in the fields and threads itself into the wind, winds up coating anything with a burr enough to stick. It snows, little squalls of it accumulated in the niches, the pockets fall has turned out. It is snow that is not snow, a white reminder, until it dyes itself with all the other detritus, becomes the glue of bark and twigs and leaves, leaving nothing but filth, tilth, a kind of felt.
Ruminant
VISIBLE COW
I think of him thinking about his cows. I never even knew he was a dairyman. At the Starbucks in the Student Union where I worked he'd ask me about the steamed milk — real milk, right? — in the latte. I think of that now. He'd nurse the drink all day, staring off into space, the space so thick I could almost see that electromagnetic soup of digital bleats bawling from the laptops, the cell phones, the other students all around him nudging and pawing, grazing through their e-mail, their texts. I drifted over to him, started talking. He bought me a macchiato stained with milk and never let on he left a dairy farm to come to school. Though once early on, now that I think about it, he told me one could major in ice cream if one wanted to. I majored in numbers. Made ends meet. Thinking about it now, there were infinite silences between us like the silences between the bits of the binary alphabets herding around us in the ether. He didn't say much at all, but that is the nature of farm boys, I guessed, or at least the ones I met back then, weaned in the vacuums of all those empty acres out there. All that absence to fill with work or with the internal working of the brain. I guess you get used to it, can hear, in those silences, yourself think. It was only later, when we were breaking up, that he showed me the snapshots of his cows posed on some hillock somewhere out there. They had names of course. The names began with A or B, Apple or Bossie, Alice or Betty, the initials trading places through the generations, a to b to a to b like some equation or formula or the rhyme scheme of a sonnet's endless couplets. I could tell a lot by the way he tiled the photographs like the descending cataract of a table full of solitaire. He had shuffled through the lot of them again and again. He recited the names. I think now this must have been what he was thinking of when I watched him thinking. The album of pictures. The list of names. They all looked alike to me, the cows, all of them, white on black slabs of clouds, stayed by the four little guy- wire pegged legs pegged to the ground. All of them caught in the act of chewing. He liked to take me then to the dairy barns on the edge of campus, to the herds of milling cows, mewing calves, the blocky steers rubbing their coats on the white wooden fences. There he found the one sad beast with a flap in her side, a fistula the bovine scientists covered over with a plastic window. The cow, content in her stanchion, snuffed up the grain in neat piles at her feet. I watched him consider the animal, all lost in thought. Through the porthole I could see the churning stomach percolate the fermenting feed back and forth. It was complicated like mixing a drink back at the coffee bar, all agitation and vapor and the chemistry of layers breaking down, so busy, all of these goings-on, going on on the inside while we, stock still on the outside, stood, lost in thought, struck dumb.
BUTTER COW
Driving to the State Fair, I think of him thinking. I am along for the ride. Driving through this state, you don't have to think about driving. The car has its own head, trails straight on, knows its own mind. Mindless. In this state, the grid of the section roads is interrupted by only one diagonal highway. You just drive. You can't get lost in this space, only lost in thought. The cornfields switch to soybean fields on the right side of the car, and on the left, they switch, the soybeans and the corn, the other way around every half mile, then back again to the other — corn, soybeans, corn, soybeans. And every mile another road intersects the one you're on at the squarest of right angles. In that part of the state, the fences are gone, have all been torn out. The crop rows shoulder up to the shoulder of the road. I am thinking, he is thinking which fields of corn, fields of soybeans, were once pastures, once hayfields with windrows or scattered herds of drying bales. He sees again the fences, contemplates the gates, how they open and shut, the mazes of lost fenced lanes and vanished grass alleys between the fields, and the cattle and the hogs and even some sheep turned into a field of stubble to stumble around, snuffling in the furrows to glean. The cows drifting, staggered and staggering, find the highest part of any acre finally to arrange themselves randomly like humans in an elevator, meditating without thinking about it, a moseyed contemplation, as the sky lowers and the shadows the sun throws grow longer and the cow shadows jostle with the cows, as the cows and cow shadows rearrange themselves again — constant minute adjustments, diplomatic dances, specific gravities attracting and repelling, a grinding inclination, the cows pulling the heavy thoughts of themselves through the grass by their teeth.
And at the fair people there walk and eat, lap up against each other, wave the paper napkins stained with four kinds of grease across their moony faces, work their way around fried solids stuck on sticks as they circle each other and circle the animals parading in the show rings and pacing in the paddocks and pens. Stunned by the sun, he trudges forward, and I follow after. We can't stop eating, continue eating clouds of cotton candy even as we find ourselves in the cloud showers set up on the Grand Concourse, the spun sugar turning to syrup in our hands that we then lick clean, licking without a second thought. We escape into the cool Varied Industry pavilion, wander up to join the crowd surrounding the glassed-in refrigerated room where a woman constructs this year's cow sculpted in butter, Brown Swiss this time, the breeds taking turns through the years — Jersey, Guernsey, Holstein. She layers the spans of butter onto a cantilevered skeleton of bent wood and sprung metal. Through the glass before me I see through the glass on the other side of the room the rows of patient people there lined up, staring, chewing something as they watch her fold the butter into the lips of the dewlap and saggy melted skin above the brisket. The slabs of butter she is working onto the articulated flanks look like slabs of meat, all marble. The butter's edges are curried into each other over the hook and pin bones, worked then into the valley of the thurl. The crowd around us forgets they are chewing and chews, forgets to swallow, lost in the whorl of butter spread like fur over the jacket of fat. I think I know what he is thinking as he watches. How the assembly line of slaughter takes an animal apart, down to tabletop cuts, now unrecognizable pucks of flesh. He is thinking inside about the whole exposed anatomy in butter. Each organ inside — the heart and lungs, the liver and kidneys, the tongue and brain — made of different breeds of soft cheese. The milky blood all milk. The butter udder. He is thinking of all the slathered transformations. How the four-chambered butter stomach would transform butter grass into buttermilk and the butter grass buttermilk turns into buttermilk butter cream and the butter cream into creamy butter butter. How the butter of the butter cow would look like this butter butter. How even the nails and washers and fencing scrap and baling wire cropped up by the grazing butter cow, finding its way to the butter hardware stomach, would also be sculpted in butter. The butter metal would lodge in the butter reticulum — indigestible, inorganic — its rust made up of a rust made up of butter.