BULL

“I thought you said that bull was shy,”
My uncle said as he and I
Stopped walking out in mid-July
        And leaned on his neighbor’s fence.
“He was,” the neighbor said.  “Ain’t now;
Not so’s you’d notice, anyhow.”
And its appetite for a brindle cow
        Seemed, like the bull, immense.

My uncle asked “So what’d you do?”
The neighbor paused a decade or two,
Then, “Wrote to Agricultural U,”
        We watched the bull perform.
At last, my uncle:  “What’d they say?”
“Asked for a sample.”  I thought the way
These two were going it’d take all day
        To agree July was warm.

“They sent some serum.  I gave him a shot.”
He finally said.  “You see what I got.”
We watched the scene the neighbor’d wrought
        Like bovine sex were new.
The bull seemed willing to give his all,
To young or old, to short or tall,
Their udders big, mid-size, or small,
        An indiscriminate view.

I thought the calves would long be dead
Of boredom before my uncle said
“What was in it?” and shook his head
        And gave my arm a shake
Because while bored and under-awed
I’d found an anthill to maraud
And restlessly had kicked a clod
        Just to see it break.

He answered before the thought of sweat
And how it splashed on dust could get
Its grip on me, to my regret.
        “Well, I don’t rightly know.”
We watched the scene the serum caused
Through air the heat had lightly gauzed,
And sweated and waited.  He spit, and paused.
        “It tasted like licorice, though.”