Elizabeth J. Whittington

---

Bull

------Billings Farm, Woodstock, Vermont

Black, with a fat metal ring
blooming through your nose,
your huge head cratered
like the surface of the moon,
depressed at the center where
sunken to the neck
the brain knows
only hunger and constriction.

Your round eye guns me
and I lean in, willing you to lift
a massive shoulder, willing you
to charge the double fence
and fling your rippling bulk
into the dense day.
But you are maligned,
not metaphysical,
your manhood pulled into vials
and recorded in mail order
manuals for artificial farming.

Inside the long barn
your children and their many mothers
rattle their chains in the stinking
heat, backs slung low beneath
the hanging rows of punishing
prongs.  The gutter is full
of excrement.  Pregnancy is everywhere,
blanketing the dry straw
with excess flesh.

One breeder, flies crowding
the corners of her eyes, rests
her head with its cavernous nostrils
on the high wooden plank
of her stall, eyes deep with longing.
Hands arrive with mash
and I see it's food she wants.
Simply food.

Outside shadows hover near
the shimmering sun with its burning arc
of lavender lines.  Ragged clouds
are poised to move in and spread
their dim breath across the broad face
until it melts into night
and delivers the moon.

The cows will shift and sleep,
shift and sleep.

Copyright (C)Elizabeth J. Whittington, 2006. All rights reserved.
Previously published in print in Kalliope: A Journal of Women's Art