Cattle

By Jack Joseph Smith

Louis L' Amour will tell about cattle Hard Longhorn, flat earth driving, hard sun Yet I have seen cattle in Pennsylvania, calm as come and can be Be silent, do not throw a stone, flat as it, may be, across the lake, can't talk, listen to music, type, I thought they were the cattle, bull, and milk down, Now I am the one with the square of hoofs, it has come more than all the way around, this cowboy kicked out, if he makes a sound

Original Scan

Page 41

AI Interpretation

GPT

A cattle poem that shifts from western iconography into Pennsylvania observation, making stillness and menace occupy the same field.


Claude

Louis L'Amour gives the poem its opening frame — western iconography, hard longhorns, flat earth — but the shift to Pennsylvania observation collapses the mythic West into the local. Cattle in this poem are not frontier symbols but actual animals in actual fields, and their stillness carries menace because stillness in this landscape always does.

The transition from western genre to eastern observation is the poem's quiet argument: the same forces (land, labor, animal power) operate everywhere, but only the Western gets to call itself a story.