HEATHER AND THE FISTULATED COW
				    
You will know the veterinary student.  He will be the one with an arm lost   
inside a cow through this opening or that.   
    
And, you see, if you could be described as fistulated, you would have an   
opening in your left side near your stomach.  Odds are, this does not   
describe you.   
    
Heather has surgery today.  She'll be smaller in a few hours by an   
appendix and a little tumor, though heavier by sedatives weighing her   
down.  For now, she prefers I not discuss fistulation.   
    
Now if you had your arm submerged in a cow's maze of rumen, you might feel   
the occasional peristaltic tremor tickling up your arm.  I won't tell you   
why you would want to do this.  You must provide that answer.   
    
Just as you must explain feeling a cow's pulse from the inside and   
jostling her humongous kidneys.   
    
Heather must be out now.  We people do that for one another, we show this   
kindness.  When we put our arm inside another's side, we don't let them   
keep grazing, we don't put a big magnet in their mouth so we can pull it   
from their side like a magic trick.  Heather appreciates this.   
    
I just stare at the cow's porthole as if trying to see into the stateroom   
of a grand ocean liner.  Anchored now, she will sail these fields like a   
champion, will have the sense to see icebergs as icebergs, fear no wave,   
no El Nino.   
    
She knows that there isn't a river alive that wishes it were the Colorado,   
she knows the only reason she would get a medical or veterinary science   
degree would be to show off in front of the other cows.  And she is above   
such things.   
    
Heather will wake up soon.  She will resent this poem.  But she won't mind   
being alive and awake and able to eat soon while the hole in her side   
heals itself into a thin smile.