Freeing the Dead Cow in River - Poem

Literary Review, Summer, 2001 by Eric Torgersen

   In the daydream poem-to-be that surfaced once years ago
   it would have been a woman, her last slow float down the river
   in the final grip and current of her one life story,
   and I, on the bank, would have sighted her and dreamed her
   a song, perhaps her first, perhaps only her last;
   I'd have thought for us all, then chosen the wisest nothing,
   let her go on alone, as she seemed to know how to.

   This thing snagged here instead, the ineluctable
   cow conferred by the only and endless world--
   just a distended black-and-white hump above water,
   far too much like a hugely pregnant belly;
   the rest furred brown, as if she'd been long on her way.
   I let her be for a week; she was getting nowhere
   till I gave her a first timid push with the end of a garden rake.

   I wound up good and wet in that bad Ganges,
   fell in, at first, for trying too hard to stay dry,
   then waded in with the rake to muscle the bulk of her
   free and nudge her out like a tug to the channel.
   Her head rose out of the water once, pale and rancorless;
   then she found the current and it took her
   and I who'd freed her turned to my next labor.

Eric Torgerson, author of Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, teaches at Central Michigan University