Ars longa, vita brevis

Ars longa, vita brevis*

While I slept you slept too and the both of us

on and off, a light switch in a trembling

left hand patting the wall the night

stand to find it throwing the globe of the glow

along the low ceiling watching the way shadows

fall as though it were all water tossed

from a bucket against the stall where earlier

in my life a calf was being born and her mother

licked what she could away and the rest

especially the bloody hay was left to the broom

and shovel and I pushed it and scooped it

and lifted it to the wheelbarrow and carried it

away and pushed every now wet blade

up to the shit and tipped and dipped and went

back for more.  This birthing life this watching from

the stall while the cow groans and grows

and comes into her own and months on end:  

grain and water and hay and long days in the pasture

her eyes roll back and she bellows and huffs and does it 

all by herself and in the end licks what wounds

she can reach and makes for the baby and I shovel

first around them and then, when they are

moveable: bucket bucket bucket and the blood

is washed clean off.  I say to myself after talking

with you about it, after you told me you slipped

and fell in the powder room that it wasn’t just 

that you bruised easy now that you’re older, or

that you hit your head just to need to shave

(maybe they’ve stitched you with your own hair

I know they do that sometimes) but the boiling

headaches after are what life  has come to now

and the vomiting and the cerebral bleeding—days 

later, after you’re home and made comfortable.

The cow and her new daughter are just a dis-

traction and really the wrong metaphor for it

all, but maybe what I’m getting at is what a sheer

machine a body is, how it tips to the wounded

thing intoxicated as it is with pain and labor  

and after, when what we’ve given birth to

is standing on its own has been licked clean

and butts the udder to feed, maybe while we

are putting the slop bucket up on the wall

again, again, again, the blood and the puke 

and the new bed laid by maybe I say: if this is 

life, do we choose each ache and fall or do we 

fall into each ache and in the end say it’s not that 

I want to die, no, it’s never been that, it’s just

I don’t want to (and yet why would I want it

otherwise?) live

this way.

*Art is long, life is short