Cattle

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

The poem sets the pulp-western frame of 'Louis L' Amour' and his 'Hard Longhorn, flat earth driving, hard sun' against a quieter eastern fact: 'Yet I have seen cattle in Pennsylvania, / calm as come and can be.' It ends by folding the speaker into the herd - 'Now I am the one with the / square of hoofs' - a cowboy who has been 'kicked out' and now only worries whether he can still 'make a sound.'

What the poem really does is trade the loud myth for the silent animal. The middle instruction - 'Be silent, do not throw a stone, flat as it, / may be, across the lake, can't talk, listen / to music, type' - reduces a whole genre of action to stillness, listening, and the small clerical act of typing. Then comes the strange transformation: the man who watched the cattle becomes one, hooves and all, 'come more than all the / way around.' The closing line, 'if he makes a sound,' leaves identity provisional - the exiled cowboy-turned-beast is unsure he can even low, let alone narrate, so the L'Amour bravado has emptied into a creature hoping it still has a voice.