The Separation of Kin

Bovine distress bristles the countryside.

The calling is unbearable:
their constant blatting across our yard.
What could our neighbor be thinking,
selling the babies to the other neighbor
where they cry for their mothers
in the field beside our house?
Young throats open, offspring
question parents, and the cows’ reply
with a low keening, answered ten seconds later.
All night
their pleadings echo over pastures,
reverberate through our rooms,
spread through the dark woods, tree trunk to tree leaf,
rise above the canopy into morning.
Tomorrow
hoarse from exhaustion and despair,
a deep acquiescence unknown to humans
will have overtaken these sentient beasts,
but this day our only choice
is to endure this loss surrounding us,
rivet our gaze in the amber light,
and imagine silence.

We're burying the old farmers this year.
Uncle Wally, short, bald, and
kind, my father, Alfred, tough
and willful, old Paul,
quiet and half smiling.
We've dressed their cold bodies
in the deep brown and gray pinstripe suits
they kept on hangers
in the back of their bedroom closets
and wore only when they showed up
clean, their hair slicked back with water,
at church for weddings and funerals.

These old men,
who stood and jawed each other
in their spare time
outside their tall barn doors,
arranged years ago
to meet when it was over
for a tractor race
where Raystone Creek
runs under the bridge
to the Pitkin place.
Today's the day.
Wearing suits, white handkerchiefs
pointing out of breast pockets,
Paul on his Allis Chalmers,
Alfred revving a John Deere,
and Wally, his Farmall idle,
wait three abreast
behind a scrawn of crabapple,
in the meadow where barley
wouldn't grow.

Engines growling, they knotch
up the gas, roar
into a cold spring wind,
bump up off their homemade cushions
on the steel seats, teeth
knocking together
when they come down.

A flock of swallows
three feet into the air,
catches a wind, and blows
like so many seeds. They stretch
their shining six-inch spans
and float sideways, one body
over green grass. Seeing them,
the men shift to high gear,
cursing with the glee of men
free of dreams,
free of wives and children, banks,
horses and cows, crops, seasons.
Men free of desire,
and arguments, free of thunderstorms
and ice storms, free of the sun.

Birds disappear and the tractors
become a grove of maple trees
in whose high branches
their hum thins to a rustle, a tapping
of one branch against another.