BLAME IT ON THE COWS

An old student writes from Israel that she's living on a kibbutz.
It's a strange pastoral she paints of her friend Golan,
assigned to the cows. Moody, he hates them all,
along with their barn.
After trekking across America he became endlessly confused.
She senses his dismay, having traveled far
to understand her childhood in the city.
She thinks she'll see it more clearly in Hebrew
and threatens not to write
one more poem
until words are delivered in the mother-tongue.
I sit on a mountainside, watching the barn,
the slow cows.
Their dailiness cuts one path through the hills.

First published in American Voice