Something To Believe In
He’s almost three, he’s learning words’ first letters--
maybe this is the year I’ll have to explain
Santa’s claws, Round John Virgin, gay apparel,
angel herds, bobtails, Orient Are,
and why the wise men never came again,
I think to myself, hearing the carillon
as I carry him and the daily Herald across
the street: there’s the church, the biggest thing
in the middle of town, Christmas music swelling
from stained-glass windows like the smell of a cake.
All year long, he’s been after me to sing
more Christmas music, defiantly performing
the one that he remembers: “Fa-la-la-la-laaa!”
Kirsten is in there, Kirsten’s father is Minister,
why has he never asked to go there? Even
foul-mouthed and fundamentally un-
repentant friends are sending their children for
the sake of “having something to believe in”...
He doesn’t notice. Into the truck and off
to Back Acres Farm for a gallon of Carringtons’ raw
milk: the shining stainless steel bulk tank
the biggest bottle a baby ever saw;
and cows, a double row of jaws extending
farther than he has ever dared to walk.
He feeds his favorite heifer, then he enters
the aisle between the facing heads in search
of calves. There’s usually one or two, the bright
side of there usually being, but not for long,
one or a couple of down or disabled cows.
(“Have to stay in the black to make the white stuff.”)
A few days with their dams and calves are strong
enough to bawl with the other little doughies.
“Calves don’t like to be petted,” I explain,
but he proves me wrong, he finds one lying down
and sets to work. I stand there, passing time
by wondering what the cows get out of this.
To have a place in these rows...it must add up...
so many nodding heads...like toward the end
of contradancing “Bull Durham”?...or being part
of those Shaker ceremonies, men on one side,
women on the other?...Then I see it,
as if the air had suddenly grown cold
and cleared: the automatic watering pans
like fonts of holy water; breath like incense
puffing from censers; those becalmed bodies
heavy with furs, all silent, while their cheekbones
work like those of the aged widows who stayed
after to pray for the husbands for whom they had bought
--Mass. And the Garden of Eden was God’s barn.
So there’s my son, kneeling in manure
to bump foreheads with a runt calf,
the image of the innocents who died
in the Canaan tribes the Israelites were proud
to put to the sword. I think of Jesus pleading,
“Don’t be like the Romans, tend to your sheep!”
The butcher says, “Kids like him, they’re our future.”
“No, he isn’t,” I said. “He’ll be shot.
He doesn’t like to fight--those are the ones
we’re paying to have killed off in El”...Salvador?
EL SALVADOR IS SPANISH FOR VIETNAM.
He’ll understand the Romans: they’re the big kids
kitchie-kooing and poking and pinching him--
the Legion types, whose laws now say it’s wrong
to buy him hours-fresh, unpasteurized milk.
He isn’t looking, so I get to watch
his face--so balanced--people say that he could
be a model, make us lots of money...
Off he charges, after a bigger calf
to cuddle with. It cowers by its mother.
“What’s that on the cow’s ear?” he wonders.
“That’s a number tag. There’s too many cows
to give them all names, there’s too many different shapes
of black and white to ever remember them.”
Maybe there won’t be so much explaining to do.
God is what it is that makes it so
you never tire of the markings on cows.
It must have happened in a place like this,
where many had given birth, as if Christ came
to bring men back to women, thence to God.
He’ll understand that Mary dreamed her baby
was someone very special, and so it became--
take away the Roman Saturnalian
calendar coincidence, the rendering
unto Caesar what was Jesus, the kitsch
that German dustmop the Tannenbaum picked up,
put it back into summer, and what would be left?
All done at last. Time to go get our milk.
He’ll understand that a man can’t give milk,
but would if he could, and sometimes gives his life
instead: “This is my body; this is my blood.”
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