Some Poems from Desire For More Cows

 

     The Donuts

There's nothing supernatural about Sprinkle Girl,
no thunderbolts cracking as her hips sway to a classic rock 
     station,
no sailors whimpering, ships splitting when she sings "Dazed 
     and Confused,"

you can't even hear her, as only her lips show the difference
behind the glass wall and the slick, steel tables.
She is the center,

the open space, the hole, the crux
with racks and trays of donuts huddled around her;
she raises them from the oil,

she anoints them with the sprinkles and the powder and the 
     jelly,
the frosting, glaze, and cinnamon,
she turns to them

and makes them extraordinary.
And were I
in her hands as the least of them,

would she think twice about me, steaming there
at the touch
of pink sprinkles?



     On A Business Trip To Tampa 
     i. In The Saint Louis Airport

they keep their smokers in a shiny box
and as you whiz past on the moving sidewalk
you have to stare as if you'd paid admission
say things like "oh, look at that one" and
"isn't that cute" while they watch from inside the glass
as people stand still rushing past
down a tube and up into the atmosphere



     Lewis And Clark: September 20, 1806

          That afternoon, the men saw cows on the bank, 
          a sight that brought out spontaneous shouts of 
          joy.
          --from Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. 
            Ambrose

For over 2 years
they'd lived in a swirling
world of elk and buffalo,
pronghorn antelope, grizzlies big
as cliffsides, over 2 years
on a planet
whose maps they were drawing,
whose plants
they folded with English
words for the first time
ever; you don't today
think you'll walk over the Rockies in a day,
but they didn't see why not,
and they're the ones
who told us
you can't
and told us a name
for every river,
creek, and trickle fattening the Missouri
from its mouth to its tail,
told us trout and vultures and prickly pears and prairie dogs,
who walked in space
so long
the world assumed them dead
by Lakota or Blackfeet
or Canadian winter or disease
or bears or dragons or mutiny or madness or starvation or
any of the names Death has
where maps end
and sky starts.
They dug,
they hunted, they
begged, they labored
for meat or grains, fish or roots,
and all but one man somehow
were still afloat,
upriver from Saint Louis,
surfing the Missouri madly
after such wild years,
such tall tales and isolation
and they shouted, oh they shouted,
and look around you too
and you'll realize why,
they shouted for the cows
because a cow means
you're home.

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