Saturday's Poem: Heifer Calving
HEIFER CALVING by Robert Isaacson
It is 2:00 a.m.
when Sally wakes me:
“The heifer is calving.
Get up!”I peer from deep sleep
at a screaming
bare ceiling light bulb:
”God damn it!
Why can’t she do it
on her own?"
And then I remember:
the last one, bred too young
by mistake,
to the big Hereford bull.
We pull on boots,
tall rubber ones,
and hike out
into the black, winter night
down the steep road
to the muddy corral.
We have
one flashlight.
It flickers
in the frosty air.
Thoughtless, in a tee shirt,I grow cold.
My sleep warmth
steams off me.
“I am too old
for this shit,”
I whine to no one,
to the dark.
I think
of my friends
in suburban beds,
friends
who will wake
in a few hours, warm,
to burbling
automated coffee machines.
The flashlight flickers:all goes black.
I am
51 years old,
in the dark,
chasing
a god damn heifer
with a big
calf leg
sticking straight out of her,
running
in circles,
knee deep
in sucking mud,
fermented , rotting barley hay,
steaming shit.
We are all blind,
and she will not go
through the gate.
The light flashes on again.
Its pale beam
punctures the darkness,
and the heifer
sees the gate,
runs through,
plunges down
the long, black lane
to the Teco squeeze.
In pitch darkness,
we stumble after her,
slamming the metal gates
as we go,
yelling pointless
orders to one another.
We leap over
the crowding pen walls.
I curse and scream
for light, somehow
catch her,
bawling,
mouth foaming,
in the head gate.
We get behind her:
the single leg
ominous, wrong,
her rear end obscene,
distended from pushing.
Sally sticks her arm in,
feeling
into the strange warmth
for the other leg.
The light
goes out,
comes on again.
We curse each other,
the heifer,
ourselves.
Sally loops a chain
above the hoof.
Together we pull,
leaning nearly to the ground,
again,
again,
and again.
The heifer bellows.
The light goes out,
comes on again.
Sally reaches in
and chains
the inside foot.
We hook the come along.
I crank
the winch.
Nothing happens.
Then movement, a mouth,
with long tongue
hanging dully,
glazed eyes,
and hunched shoulders.
It hangs up on its hips,
suspended like a frozen diver,
slimy, steaming
in the freezing air.
The heifer
bellows,
bull-like,
shudders,
starts to collapse
in the chute.
The winch out of cable,
we pull by hand,
sliding in the mud,
falling together
to the ground.
The calf slides
out at last,
headlong
into life.
Light-headed,
amazed,we drag it
floundering
into the corral.
We release
the staggering mother
from the head gate.
Arm in arm,
we walk home,
laughing loudly
into the blackness,
the moonless night.
Above us,
a billion winter stars.
Frost is forming.
A weary heifer
licks her curled calf dry.