Dargie's intro poem

Hi guys - this is the first poem from my old sequence about time I spent living and working in Arkansas.  I'm hoping the poems I'll be workshopping will be in conversation with these older ones to some extent; I'm thinking they will form part of the same MS.  Happy December! 

YOUNG

I can’t remember what happened to Benna’s calf,

which I saw born—pulled, with what we called a jack.

She was a dairy cow and her calf was male, so worth

almost nothing. Four days later she was dead on the floor

of a livestock trailer. The vet took the knife from his belt

and cut into her starting at the shoulder. Blood

ran under my boots and I saw all four stomachs.

I learned how to roll cigarettes because it was cheaper.

At night we sat at the edge of the hill looking out

through a half mile of fireflies all the way to the river. We drank whiskey 

out of plastic bottles, rode logging roads to the watershed

on bench seats in trucks, Jesse’s, Andy’s, Travis’s.

Big nights at the Cedar Lounge men said to me, You slumming?

and, You think you can handle me?