Text

David Wagoner (b. 1926), “Being Herded Past the Prison’s Honor Farm” (used with permission of the author)

The closer I come to their huge black-and-white sides, the less
Room there is in the world for anything but Holsteins.
I thought I could squeeze past them, but I’m stuck now
Among them, dwarfed in my car, while they plod gigantically
To pasture ahead of me, beside, me, behind me, cow eyes
As big as eightballs staring down at another prisoner.

They seem enormously pregnant, bulging with mash and alfalfa,
But their low-slung sacks and rawboned high-rise rumps look insur-
Mountable for any bull. One side-swipes my fender
And gives it a cud-slow look. What fingers would dare
Milk those veiny bags? Not mine. I’m cowed. My hands
On the steering wheel are squeezing much too tight to be trusted.

They all wear numbers clipped to their ears. They’re going to feed
Behind barbed wire like a work-gang or, later, like solitaries
Stalled in concrete, for the milk of inhuman kindness.
They clomp muddily forward. Now splatting his boots down
Like cowflops, the tall black numbered trusty cowpoke tells me
Exactly where I can go, steering me, cutting me out of the herd.