Andrea Cohen med dikt fra Iowa og på vei til Norge

Butter

I’ve never seen the land

of milk and honey, but at

the Iowa State Fair I glimpsed

a cow fashioned of butter.

It lived behind a window

in an icy room, beneath klieg lights.

I filed past as one files

past a casket at a wake.

It was that sad: a butter cow

without a butter calf. Nearby I

spied

a butter motorcycle, motorcycle-

sized, a mechanical afterthought

I thought the cow might have liked to ride.

You don’t drive a motorcycle; you ride it.

But not if you’re a butter cow, not

if you’re a butter cow who’s seen, if

not the land of milk and honey, the land

of milk, and dwelled within it.

It had a short life span, the butter cow.

Before it died, I looked

deep into its butter eyes. It saw

my butter soul. I could

have wept, or spread myself,

for nobody, across dry toast.

*

To Whom it May Concern

For Harry Cobb

Soon I’ll move to Norway.

If that’s a bitter pill,

well, swill, swallow. I’m going,

and I won’t wallow, not in Norway,

where they’re so beyond

slave labor, with laws that say

a clerk must work within five

meters of a window through

which she can see a tree

and by that tree be seen.

My mind’s made up.

I will be Norwegian with Norwegian

trees. I’ll be seer and be seen.

It’s a scenic scene, it’s

how it goes, I’m going.

Tell the top brass, if

they ask, I don’t give

a damn about their asses.

But I will miss the beeches and the ashes.

It’s not their fault I’m leaving.

They’re only trees, and

leaving, I’m Norwegian.

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Kilde: Poetry Foundation & Poetry (Januar 2010).

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