There is a story of the crew of a Japanese fishing trawler picked up at sea, who claimed their boat had been sunk by a cow falling out of the sky. It turns out they weren’t drunk. Russian soldiers had stolen a cow out of a field and for a prank had loaded it on their transport plane to take back to Russia. But the terrified cow dashed madly back and forth, banging into the walls of the hold until they decided, for their own safety, they had better push it out over the sea.
The cow that jumped over the moon
drifts now like a table down—
not drifting, really, but ripping along as if she had been shot
from one of Monty Python’s catapults, hysterical bulk,
udder waving in so much brooding space
she appears to drift
toward a rippling plain below.
As the sun strikes her, she lights up, a Golden Calf now,
an astrological sign, an advertisement—Elsie the Cow—
if the fishermen would look up.
But they are preparing the trawler like a manger for the event,
coiling ropes, pulling in nets.
They are passing over the surface, oblivious
as the clipper in Bruegel’s painting,
while the heavens are opening,
while the cow lists temporarily to the side, feels the sag
of her body, watches the only sky available
in the last, interesting minutes—
though it is all the same, clouds or plains of water,
rolling across her vast mind.
Now she herself is rolling for no reason back to her feet
above the widening black craft where the Japanese fishermen
are hauling the last net in, laughing
in their small brotherhood of hunger and smells.
The cow falls heavy and heavy,
monotonous and unromantic, part of all things falling in nature.
At the last second they see her as she sees them,
each uselessly drawing back in mute recognition
before the shattering, the counter-idea,
which is definitely wrong in one sense and regrettable,
which could be, though, exactly what the gods intended,
another unusual birth and death
of a few moments’ duration, to be believed or not,
an ancient Chinese koan
to drive the thinking mind out of itself
to rest on the fluctuating sea.