Feeding the New Calf
by Joyce Sutphen

The torso comes out slick and black,
after hoofs that are yellowed
like smoker's teeth, the back
two legs crossed over each other and
the head last, bunched over front legs.

Minutes later he is standing wobbly,
and the blunt mouth is sucking at my arm,
tongue rough as sandpaper, tickling along my
skin, ripping up the fine hair over my wrist.
I tie him with a rope of bailing twine,

Shake out a chunk of straw around him,
as the dust rises in the sunlit aisle. I pet
the wet coat that curls over his sharp
backbone, scratch ears that are thick as
tulip leaves, bent in the womb. Angus baby.

I think of the blue-gray afterbirth, like a shawl
he wore, now left in the gutter, of his mother,
how she groaned him out of her belly, her back
rocking back and forth in the metal stanchion,
the velvet fold of her throat on the cold cement.

After I pour the milk into a pail, I go to
where he is lunging on the rope, where he is
singing a desperate duet with his mother:
din of soulful mooing. I get him to suck
at the nipple, pulling his mouth over to it
with my hands dipped in his mother’s milk,
my small solid fingers and not her warm udders,
no peach-veined bag to sink his cheek on.

The clouds sunk in his large brown eyes
float blue. He nudges me, hard.


Joyce Sutphen, "Feeding the Calf" from Straight out of View. © 2001 by Joyce Sutphen. Use by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Holy Cow! Press, www.holycowpress.org (buy now)

It's the birthday of Annie Dillard (books by this author), born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1945). She wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) and it won a Pulitzer Prize. She was 29 years old.

It's the birthday of short-story writer Josip Novakovich (books by this author), born in Daruvar, Croatia (1956). He moved to the United States as a young man and has written several books in English, including the memoir Apricots from Chernobyl (1995).

It's the birthday of poet and critic John Crowe Ransom (books by this author) born in Pulaski, Tennessee (1888). He founded The Kenyon Review and he was one of the most important literary critics of his time.

It's the birthday of American poet and diarist Winfield Townley Scott (books by this author), born in Haverhill, Massachusetts (1910). In 1958 he published The Dark Sister, a long poetic narrative about Leif Ericson's ambitious, crazy half-sister. It was critically well-received but interest soon waned. He wrote a number of poems that were considered masterpieces at the time, including "Mr. Whittier." William Carlos Williams was a great admirer of Winfield Townley Scott.

But Scott faded into obscurity, partly because he wrote long heroic narratives, sonnets, and other traditional forms at a time when they were no longer fashionable, and partly because he spent the last part of his life addicted to sedatives and bourbon. He died two days before his 58th birthday from an overdose of sleeping pills.

It's the birthday of writer Alice B. Toklas (books by this author), born in San Francisco (1877). In 1907 she went to Paris where she met Gertrude Stein and the two women became lovers. They moved into 27 rue de Fleurus where they began a salon that became a social hub for artists and writers including Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse, and Fitzgerald. In 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published, which was actually written by Gertrude Stein and not Toklas. But after Stein died Toklas wrote her own memoir, called What Is Remembered (1963). She said, "Gertrude Stein … held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since then."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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