Twenty years ago in Illinois

I lived my life in fields,

watching daybreak push

through barn walls into bands

of haydust and summer.

Memory ties me to weather,

the thick swarm of air mid-day

that shifts the fields into motion,

and the coolness of evenings.

Now, I have only moments between cities.

On a hill,

there are Holsteins in a circle.

In the center are seven calves,

lying down like innocents.

To them, I am nothing.

They have the sweet milk

of their mothers, and the new grass

to keep them fed.

This is why I work, and live my life.

What else can I do?

I pull off onto a grey slope of gravel,

and park near the fence.

It is rusty barbed wire,

hanging loose from post to post.

A calf wanders across the shadows

that have spread out into the pasture.

I have never seen a cow this close.

It has wet-rimmed eyes that see the grass

and shade I have become.