Summer gnats colonized her molasses black eyes, her flicking,
conical ears. She moaned, a badly tuned
tuba, and tassels of ick dripped
from her black-

on-pink nostrils like strings of weed sap. Waking from a rhythmic
nap in my arm, you wobbled your head upright
and stared at the great hanging skin-
bag, teats, dry-docked

hull of her ribs, anvil head, and the chocolate calm in her eyes
that gazed back as I carried you closer, wading
through goldenrod, mulleins, thistle
all artfully bent

clear of your soft exposed feet. Ants worried the punky
tops of knotted fence posts, and caution flags
of gossamer and milkweed fluff
marked each rust-twist

of barb, but that was all that divided you and her. I felt briefly
happy to be prop, peripheral in this exchange,
this unfolding bundle of knowing that
was you in

an over-grown ditch where the air swelled, shaking itself dry
in the sumac. What was I shown that I haven’t retained?
What peered back long before the cracked
bell of its name

came sounding off a tongue’s hammer and fenced it forever? Know
that it happened, though – you were a drooling lump
of living in the verdant riddle. That heifer
remembers

nothing of you. Let chicory, later in life, be bothersome blue
asterisks footnoting one empty, unrecoverable
hour of your early and
strange.