Origin Stories - James Penha – Gyroscope Review

“Cows“

Origin Story of “Cows“

    Cows
    by James Penha

    The cows in the field lumber from patch
    to patch of grass and weeds; mouths 
    pull and chew and swallow and cuddle
    with an eagerness their big brown bodies
    belie. Contented—as those dairy bovines
    who produced Carnation Condensed Milk
    had been advertised for decades—cows
    need not run. They amble. They lumber.
    But their calves race and chase each other
    around the field for no good reason except 
    youth. At what age or weight or worry
    do they stop running and slow down into
    contentment, all four stomachs satisfied 
    with the meadow, all four teats granting
    more than they must or need for their own.

Origin Stories – Cows

While I was revising Cows, I thought about horse poems—by Ted Hughes, Paisley Rekdal, Ada Limón, among others—but they didn’t prompt my Cows. Rather it was my looming 76th birthday (no wonder I know Carnation commercials from the 1950s) as my husband and I drank our afternoon coffees in a pasture on a hill overlooking the sea surrounding Bali. We come here often to listen to the surf and watch the birds and the cows. But never before had I attended to the radical differences in personality between cows and their calves. Ah, youth! Ah, the contentment of age for which I still search.