Landscape with Cows

Cows, at their lumbering and stately pace,

rise from this roadside landscape, water, field

and early morning sky, not so much place

as attitude. Mist and crude rails have sealed

them in their all-but-changeless pose,

like founding fathers whom their myths embalm,

on meadows, captured, rapt, as in Corot's

mute umbered greens and shallow pools of calm.

The moment cannot last; already there's

the next billboard quickening appetites,

hawking aloud some need, somebody's wares,

some town approaching us with its delights

and deals and meretricious urge to tease

us back into our natural unease.

Rhina P. Espaillat

© 2000; first published in Sparrow.  Reprinted by
permission of the author.