Being Herded Past the Prison's Honor Farm

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.