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