Editor's Note
The poet Todd Dillard once tweeted, “I would like a poetry that is capable of a vast simultaneity, like being sad but also recognizing the human impulse to say “cow” when you see a cow.” Debmalya Bandyopadhyay’s poem ‘A cow, one summer morning’ embodies this simultaneity of being intensely felt and honestly factual.
Of course, the cow has inspired many a verse, from Linda Pastan’s ‘Cows’ to Hayden Carruth’s ‘Cows at Night’ and Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s ‘Three Cows and the Moon’. But there is always room for one more. Particularly because Bandyopadhyay’s cow is more than a pretty bovine in a grassy field. No, this a cow that is ‘staring’ or ‘sunbeaming’ right into the speaker’s eyes – this passing of gaze is the forming of a relationship. If the cow is ‘Michelangelo’s David’, then the speaker is ‘the McDonald’s clown’. The self is viewed in recognition of the other.
— Kunjana Parashar
The Bombay Literary Magazine
A cow, one summer morning
On my way to work I find a cow on the street
and it’s staring right into me. Now, hear me out –
if you ever had a cow sunbeam into you early in the morning,
the two of you stalled on the pavement like Michelangelo’s David
and the McDonalds clown, and thought – What a day to be myself,
you must have been a beautiful person. You must have
stood very close to a cow as a child and admired its
majestic mood. Do you remember? It was the June of cicadas:
hay fell in slow spells over a meadow, the wind
parented the folds of your tee. That summer, something
smelled different in the air. Cows cropped up everywhere
in your head like spring flowers. You fell in love
with their large, liquid eyes – pools brimming with wish,
darkened with I want. You wanted nothing that month.
Just to roll on the grassy chest of the world. You wanted
only to inhale its fragrances. Its pheromones. To graze
its feral form.
On godliness
In the beginning, there was little God
and mostly godliness. That pearly, liminal line
between recalling and misremembering. For years,
I’ve waited for God to shape themselves out of my lack
of discipline and memory, to turn up and say – it’s okay,
you’re just a boy. So little scorn, so much shimmering.
A voice moving like an ocean whale, gentle and panoramic.
I would be touched. I would hold their hand— if they have a hand
and I would cry just a little. In the beginning, when God created
the world out of godliness and said make what you will of it, I was built
from their tired pinkie – small and fragile with hurting.
I was finished in fragments – some empty rooms playing
the same lonely song. So when God arrives to tell me
of forgiveness, when they find me dust-scattered on the floor,
when God bends and reaches for my cheeks and wipes them
clean, I’ll hold their pinkie and won’t let go. I’ll say, sit
with me for a minute more. I’ll say, help me remember. I’ll say,
show me what you made with the rest of your hand.
The Drowning
I once saw someone I loved jump into a well
to fetch something. It was a cold Saturday
splashed with suddenness. He never said what it was
he wanted from water: a memory, a person, a poem
read years ago. My tiny hand felt his tremble
for just a minute. It’ll be just a minute, he smiled.
And then, holding his breath, a cormorant offered
himself to the blue belly of the planet. My first lesson
in letting go was also one in screaming for help. A yowl
had left my throat, crashed over the empty courtyard
as a tidal wave. Leaning in, he had shrunk to a faraway
speck in the spacious dark. What remained was less
of a person, at par, a son, small bubbles of a poem
I had once read sitting on his lap. It took me years
of reflection to understand. All he wanted was to become
his own image. All he wished to mend was his aching
vessel. How does one outweigh one’s heart?
A deer, startled by its mirroring, mistakes the water
for a friend. A friend is a sound splash, fading.
When forgotten, a face becomes a poem.
Acknowledgments
Image credits: Kuniyoshi Yasuo. Little Joe with the Cow (1923). Oil on canvas, dimensions: 51.12 × 76.52 cm (20 1/8 × 30 1/8 in.). Image courtesy WikiArt.
Kuniyoshi-san (1889 – 1953) loved painting cows. A resident of the Ogunquit Art Colony, he painted about sixty paintings, all featuring the bovine wonder. In a sense, though a pioneer in the then avant-garde American modernism movement, he also represents a throwback to the mid-19th century “farm painters” of England such as William Henry Davis, James Clark Senior, John Vine, Joseph Denovan Adam and many others. Indeed, for a time we were tempted, strongly tempted, to use one of their “rectangular cow” paintings as a banner image for Debmalaya’s poems. But there is no denying that these rectangular cows have that certain indelicate gaze-soliciting attitude more appropriate for centrefold models than high art. TBLM is a classy magazine and we chose high art. Kuniyoshi-san seems to have believed he was drawn to painting cows because he’d been born in a cow-year, as per the Japanese calendar. We were drawn to his painting because it is a fine one and reflective of the titular poem’s appreciation of the animal.
Author | DEBMALYA BANDYOPADHYAY
DEBMALYA BANDYOPADHYAY (he/him) studies for a PhD in Pure Mathematics by day and writes by night. He has been nominated for Best of the Net and was a finalist for Sweet Literary’s 2024 Poetry Prize, Sophon Lit’s 2024 Poetry Contest, and the Briefly Write Poetry Prize. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Chestnut Review, Ghost City Review, Rust & Moth, Propel, and Anthropocene Poetry, among other literary journals. He can often be found in parks confabulating with local birds.