after Philip Levine

Arabella chews her cud -
most mornings, contented enough
but suddenly the deal loses appeal,
teats tugged calf-less by cold steel

and she looks at them all,
black-on-white, flank-to-flank -
from her neighbor next-door
to the one after that and after that,
and asks herself now

                              Am I a cow?

a question that’s answered
when she finds the stash
of moonshine mash and it makes her

               IMPORTANT! UNIQUE!
               Not a machine, not this cow!

she shouts in jubilation
while Ford’s $5 a day
and horseless confabulations
silently swallow her Garden City fields
and the men’s pride - the American plan?
We hear softly now

                              Am I a man?

Whitey swaggers, just sixteen,
runs ‘hot diamonds’ down the canal
behind Chateau LaSalle,
not for the bloody Purple Gang
whose members hang out in the shvitz
while they kibitz,

but for his father and his father’s friends
that their cups might hold
a splash of gin or, just as fine,
hooch made from moonshine mash, no less,
and shake off the one-into-the-otherness
of that assembly line

                              in a blind pig,
in hours the Gray Ghost began,
a dissolution of the foot-weary jig,
a chorus, a toast

                         Not a machine, not this man!

Lotus Blooms Journal December '02